Kahurangi National Park: Cobb Valley, Mt Arthur and the Nelson Tablelands
KAHURANGI National Park, which occupies a vast area west of Motueka, is the second largest national park in New Zealand after Fiordland. With over five hundred and seventy kilometres of tracks, including the famous seventy-eight-kilometre Heaphy Track which I write about in another post, Kahurangi is tramping heaven. With its coastal palm forests, marble mountains, rare birds like the rock wren and the spotted kiwi, and tussock high country, it’s an incredible place to be.
In Māori, Kahurangi means treasured possession, which is exactly what this park is. For hundreds of years the Māori used tracks through this region to find pounamu, greenstone in local English, which was used to make taonga or heirlooms passed down from one generation to the next.
The diverse terrain I covered included a series of unique geological features. Mt Arthur is made of hard, crystalline marble: below the ground are some of the deepest shafts and most intricate cave systems in the world. Cavers have currently joined two cave systems in the area and made a massive thirty-six kilometres long, twelve hundred-metre deep…
