A Golden Day

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Heavy overnight rain, continuing this morning

Tent seems to be coping with the rain, had to move a couple of pegs, though.

Headed out for the Gold Mining Museum in Thames - a long drive, but hopefully uneventful.

Drove south down Highway 25 from Whitianga - heavy rain and spray made overtaking impossible and got stuck behind a logging truck for ages. The advantage of New Zealand summer rainstorms is that it's still warm - 20/21 degrees, rather than the cold Atlantic summer rain we get at home. I suspect that the weather systems are making their way down from the warmer northern seas.

The road went along the coast for a while and then turned inland and climbed over the hills. Like the rest of Coromandel, these were volcanic, with many of the red and yellow patches that look like hydrothermal alteration.

After an hour and a half or so, got down off the hills and into Thames. The rain was less intense here and I drove up to the museum. Damn - they have a timetable change - they're only open at weekends at the moment. Went along the shore to my alternative destination - the School of Mines and Mineralogical Museum.

I'm the only person in the museum - the curator is more knowledgable about genealogy and mining than geology, but confirms my basic guess that it's all hydrothermally altered volcanics - the gold is associated with the first of two such hydropthermal episodes. Lots of mineral specimens, mostly associated with gold mining. It's difficult to recognise many of them - they were relabelled in the 1960's in a system which has now been superceded. The place is actually a museum of a museum - the School of Mining closed in 1954 and the last mining was in the 1920's. The specimens were there as an example resource for the students - it's now effectively a memorial to a geological method that doesn't exist any more and is a museum of how they learnt mining. The curator shut the museum and kindly took me on a personal tour of the School of Mines - including the Public Assay Office, a chemistry lab in a former Sunday School and a small gold separation operation. Very interesting.

I went outside and found the rain had stopped and it was brighter and warmly humid. Had lunch on the main street of Thames - like many of the towns, there's one long street of shops surrounded by a few streets of residential housing - the shopping area serves a much larger area than th etown. It still looks more a working town than the holiday destinations on the other side of the peninsula. I drove a little way north and looked at rocks on the beach on the northern limit of the goldfield at Waimu. Found a pebble that might have some gold visible under the high magnification hand lens, but I suspect it's really cupropyritic in origin.

Drove back over the mountains to Whitianga - still drizzling on this side of the peninsula - more rain forecast later. Might go back to try the gold mining museum on Saturday - the day before I leave Coromandel. However, that means that I'd have to negotiate two Santa Parades and Pohutukawa Festival on the way, so it might be difficult.

Did some washing back at camp - I'll have to do more housekeeping tomorrow.

I'm writing this (written) log up after dark at 9.30p.m. in intense rain and strong gusty winds. Hope the tent stands up to it - it's an Ozzie design and build. I suspect it might not have the hydrostatic strength to resist very intense rain, so the droplets would start coming through. I've already had to go out and double peg the guylines. It looks as if it was designed to keep out the insects rather than the rain. It's doing a good job of that - the sandflies can't fly in this rain.

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