Three Local Walks at Karamea Will do us Just Nicely

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We awoke to another absolute cracker day in Karamea and the sound of the two milk tankers on the nearby SH67 that travel 234km each way every day to and from Hokitika on SH6 and SH67 to pick up milk from the 29 dairy farms in the Karamea region. Actually the tankers don’t really make much noise it is just that with so little traffic coming and going into Karamea that there is no competition for road noise from other traffic on the road.

We have three planned walks today in the local Karamea area with no drives into the forest like yesterday among them.

There appears to be only one other guest staying in the 8 unit motel and they appear to be in Karamea helping a dairy farmer out with milking from what we have overheard.

The other 6 units are all being used during the week by workers rebuilding the local area school and they all leave on a Friday to go home which is somewhere away from Karamea and then return on a Sunday prepared to start work again on the Monday. This has apparently been going on for a while now and the school looks far from being completed so their presence must give the motel owners a nice steady income stream. Whoever is paying their bill pays for 7 days and the units are left vacant on the weekend. Still there is probably no other way of keeping the infrastructure up to date as Karamea had a population in the last census of 2018 of 357 and we wouldn’t expect there would be many builders amongst them, if any at all.

The sandwiches yesterday that we had for lunch were so yummy that we had to go back to the same café (and only café in Karamea!) for another purchase of a triple decker corned beef with cheese and dressing to satisfy our lunchtime needs today.

As we headed to our first walk around the estuary which should give us an insight into how Karamea was started in the mid 1800’s we passed the fire station where a group of teenagers were doing car washes for $10 to raise money for things that the Min of Education won’t be supplying when the new school is finished.

So what a perfect opportunity to help out the local school kids and also wash off nearly 3 weeks of road dust and grime that had gathered on the Corolla after travelling on so many unsealed roads.

While we waited for the car to be washed we took a stroll just up the road to check out what the large bird presented as a monument in a small reserve actually was. We had passed it every time we went to and from the village from the motel but this was the first time we thought we better satisfy our curiosity as to what it represented.

The giant bird called Hakawai in the North Island and Hokioi in the South Island is surrounded in mythology and it is believed that the bird, with talons as big as panther’s paws, became extinct between 500 and 600 years ago when the Maori killed its main prey, the Moa.

The first reported skeleton of the massive bird was found in a swamp at Glenmark in North Canterbury in the late 1800’s and more recently bones were discovered at the Oparara Arch where we had walked to yesterday.

With the Corolla now looking almost back to its best we paid our teenage cleaners and drove through the village to the walkway around the estuary.

Karamea saw some Europeans in the 1860’s when gold was discovered but once that was over and because the location was so isolated with only a connection to the rest of the country being by sea it wasn’t until 1874 when a more permanent attempt to settle what turned out to be good, fertile river flats was made. Even the Maori who had used the area on a seasonal basis for many years did not settle permanently in those early days.

The outlet of the Karamea River in the early days of settlement provided a fine and safe harbour with wharfs for small ships to berth at and right up until the 1929 Murchison earthquake the safe harbour survived.However, the earthquake silted up the river and estuary ending the days of a safe harbour leaving the only access being the road completed in 1916 from Seddonville through the ranges. And this road was unreliable and still remains that way even today when bad weather strikes. When we had driven in a couple of days ago the road was still under repair in at least a dozen places, some controlled by vehicle activated traffic lights, with some large washouts still to be repaired after the last heavy rains of 3 months ago.

It was a pleasant enough walk around the estuary in the sunny and calm conditions although as you might expect there wasn’t a lot left of what had been a bustling harbour 90 odd years ago.

Next on the list of today’s walks was the trail that would take us to a 36 metre tall rimu tree which is thought to be over 1000 years old and possibly passed over by loggers back in the days before pine trees were introduced to NZ and when native trees were felled for construction purposes.

The road to the start of the trail took us alongside the Karamea River towards the first range of hills at the edge of the river flats.

A notice at the start of the trail suggested it was a 40 minute return easy walk so we decided to leave lunch until we got back.

The surrounding regenerating forest had a number of Nikau Palms growing giving a sub tropical feel to what was a NZ native forest. And although the Nikau is native to NZ it looks more like something from Fiji or Samoa to the north of NZ.

The trail was a relative easy one albeit that there was a steady climb for most of the distance of just over 1km.

Then as the trail came to a sudden end there was the giant tree, all 36 metres of it with a diameter of 2 metres that we had walked to see.

The small clearing that had been made at the end of the trail wasn’t big enough to step back from to clearly see the top of the tree without falling back into the forest.

However, the tree was definitely the tallest and largest around its girth that we had passed along the trail and its very existence after 1000 years amidst a forest where everything of a similar size or smaller had been felled, conjured up thoughts of how it alone had managed to survive.

By the time we returned to the car we were well ready for a boot lunch as we contemplated our third and last planned walk for the day, the South Terrace Zigzag Track which would take us up to the South Terrace Bluff with views over the river flats down to the village and coast and also take in the historic first European cemetery.

Access to the track was on the other side of the Karamea River and so we retraced our drive from before lunch, crossed the river near our motel and drove up the right hand bank of the river to where the trail was marked to start.

However, from the overgrown nature of the approach to the start of the trail it was clear that perhaps this track was ‘out of bounds’ and that proved to be so with a prominent notice advising ‘casual walkers’ should not attempt the track following recent storm damage. We put ourselves in the ‘casual walker’ category and decided that might just return to our accommodation and put our feet up until dinner time. The first two walks we had already done were the ones we were most interested in and so we returned to the motel to rest.

Dinner was at the appropriately named ‘Last Resort’ in the village and we dined on scallop salad for Gretchen (no whitebait on hand unfortunately) and Blue Cod for the writer washed down with North Canterbury wine.

There are still some limitations to coming to stay in Karamea, even in 2022, with a slow internet and an apology from the motel proprietors that they have to limit guests from ‘streaming’ video as their connection is not fast enough.

However, we have managed to get what we wanted to stream over the past 2 nights and again tonight by tethering the mobile phone to the laptop and bypassing the local internet connection.

Tomorrow it will start to feel like our trip is coming to an end when we head for Punakaiki for an overnight stay before it’s on to Greymouth and Christchurch.

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