An interim Joe blog …

I know Rachel left you on a bit of a cliff hanger but I’ve been instructed to write ‘The Gold Mine Blog’. This probably requires some explanation.

Because we dashed from Queenstown to Dunedin in time for Rhys’ birthday we had to make a decision about whether to re-trace our steps and do the Fjiordland national park and the famous Milford Sound. It’s said to be NZ’s number one tourist attraction. After hearing about other peoples experiences with bad weather and cancelled tours and reading up on the crowds who flock to Milford Sound we decided to give it a miss. ‘Oh how could you?’ I hear you gasp. Well we are heathens after all, and one thing we’ve found is we really don’t enjoy the whole ‘tour group’ experience. Sometimes it’s unavoidable but NZ has a lot of spectacular scenery and we felt that going back a long way to be hustled and herded around wasn’t for us.

Why am I telling you this? Well it left us a bit of extra time after Otago to work our way back to Picton to catch the ferry back to North island, so I cajoled Rachel into stopping off at a gold mine that ran little tours and was en route (well, only a couple of hundred kilometres detour anyway). I had in the past had the chance to visit many mines all over the world and it had always been our intention to take the kids to Chuquiquemata in Chile, the world’s largest mine. I’ve never been to Chuquiquemata, but I have been to its neighbour Escondida which although not quite as big is actually the world’s most productive mine – meaning they get more stuff out of the ground than Chuqui – so its big, really, really big and quite impressive, so we thought it would be something different for the kids to see. Anyway, after our travels in Peru we never quite made it all the way to the Atacama desert just to see a mine, surprise, surprise. So I thought that the gold mine tour might give them an idea of what it’s all about. And it did.

Although by most countries standards it’s a small mine, it is NZ’s biggest, and as our guide told us with a grin a mile wide; with the gold price where it is today, it’s making a lot of money. More than that, it is a modern mine, meaning a big hole in the ground, apparently you can see it from space, and huge equipment. The kids got to see the big trucks, and stand next to the big tires (at $NZ 30,000 a tire they don’t like to have too many punctures!). I was amazed to hear that to fill one of these colossal dump trucks would take a man with a shovel working non-stop for forty-eight days and yet from all the rock carried by each of these leviathans they get just two teaspoons of gold.

The mine has only been in operation since the 90’s but gold has been mined in the region since the 1880’s. There was in fact a gold rush here with would be miners coming from Europe, Australia and even China to reap the rich pickings from the harsh volcanic landscape. The old timers where surprisingly accurate and their old mine shafts are directly below the new mine. We got to explore these and see the conditions they had to live in and the equipment they had to use, as well as some of the new mining company’s local PR activities such as a modern art installation utilizing an entire field and a trout farm where the kids enjoyed feeding the fish. The joke was that the babies were about the size you get served for dinner in the UK.

Finally we got a whistle-stop tour of the smelter, where we were not allowed out of the bus (it is after all a fairly hazardous environment), a point that was emphasised when we parked up between the liquid oxygen and gas tanks and our guide informed us that we where sitting next to NZ’s largest bomb. If either tank exploded for any reason, us, the plant, and the surrounding countryside for many mile would be instantly vapourised. ‘Should we move on?’ he asked with a grin. ‘Yes please’ we all nodded.

It gives you some idea of the scale of the operation that when they decided to mine here the company bought all the surrounding land, some 26,000 hectares, and the bits they’re not mining right now were turned in four mega-farms.

So all in all an entertaining and educational morning, if a little quirky, but one I think even Rachel was surprised to enjoy!