Day 75: The Meteorological Museum

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Even exhausted as I was, I found it difficult to sleep on the rock-hard bed. I finally used my extra blanket as a mattress pad, and got to sleep that way. It was nice and quiet, though, especially for a Friday night.

Following the owner's recommendation, I walked over to the main street of town in the morning. Thames has a regular street market on Saturdays. It was an odd mixture of a community yard sale and a festival. Local stores put out sidewalk displays.
Charitable and volunteer groups held bake sales. Local craftsmen and farmers displayed their wares.

I bought two bottles of locally grown organic apple juice, and two wooden souvenirs. One was sensible: a kauri-wood outline map of New Zealand with all the little bays hand-carved. One, bought from the same craftsman, was, as I realized afterwards, a really stupid thing to buy as a souvenir: it was an elephant puzzle made out of remu wood. Of course, the only thing New Zealandish about that elephant is the remu wood, and I have a similar puzzle at home. But the elephant had such an endearing expression on his face.

When I got back from the market, I went to the Mineralogical Museum. It turned out to have begun as a study-collection for a local School of Mines.
The whole Coromandel is a gold-mining area, and the school was founded in the 1870's to teach aspiring gold-miners. It closed around 1910.

I took an hour-long tour of the School of Mines, which has been preserved. The building had originally been a church, built on a Maori burial ground with the permission of the local tribe. The Maori were not happy when it was converted to a school! A sign at the museum marks the place as a Maori burial ground and asks that visitors refrain from eating and drinking there.

The Museum itself was quite interesting, though the collection ran heavily to types of quartz; quartz seams being the gold-bearing rock in the area. Later acquisitions were evidently somewhat eclectic; for instance, there was a model of London Bridge made of resin from the kauri tree.

I should not forget to mention that, on the evening of the 11th, I went for a walk at sunset and saw the moon at first quarter, looking like a Northern Hemisphere last-quarter moon. I won't see that again at sunset! The tides here are extreme; when the tide is out I can just barely see open war in the distance. All the rest is swamp and mud flats.

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