Days 28-29: Reefton
Getting to know the locals in this tiny wild-west-style town
After visiting Abel Tasman, our next destination was a bit of a drive, so we decided to find a decent campsite along the route to break the journey up. There wasn’t a huge amount of choice of campsites unless we were willing to be eaten alive by sandflies. We were quite content with putting off our first proper encounter with the notorious sandflies so we were left with one good option: a small town called Reefton.
We arrived early on in the day and took the van to the only garage in town. The van was due to have its WOF — warrant of fitness, equivalent to an MOT — and Reefton was as good a place as any to get it done.
While the van was busy getting checked over, we popped over the road to the i-SITE to find out what we could do with the rest of our day. The lady that worked there was really kind and very helpful and she suggested a couple of historic walks that we could do in the area.
Before that though, we had a look around the i-SITE itself. Reefton came into being when people discovered that the region was a gold mine for… well, gold mining. A lot of Reefton’s history is to do with the gold mining operations that they carried out there. The rest of its history is about the hydroelectric power station that it used to have. The i-SITE still has one of the winches that would have been used to lower men down into the mine.
It also has an old section of the mine still in place. It was weird stepping from the modern visitor centre, through a curtain, and into an old mine shaft.
After we’d seen all we could see in the i-SITE, we started out on the Powerhouse Walk.
It only took us about half an hour to finish the walk, but we saw the ruins of the old powerhouse and we learnt about how Reefton first came to have electricity — they re-routed part of the river and used a hydroelectric station to create electricity. Bizarrely, this small town in the middle of nowhere in New Zealand was the first place in the Southern Hemisphere to get wired up with electricity. It even got it before London and New York. Back then, they referred to electrical light as bottled lightening — I think it should make a comeback.
The last part of the walk took us past a house whose garden was full of old cars and vans. The owner clearly wasn’t fussed about their upkeep because most of them looked like this…
Once we finished the walk, we went and picked up the van — it flew through the WOF, hooray! — and drove out of town a short way to a place called Blacks Point. Here, we walked up the Murray Creek Track.
As soon as we got out of the van we got marauded by sandflies, but the DEET seemed to keep them at bay. The walk took us up alongside a stream and across yet another swingbridge before bringing us out next to the old shaft of the Energetic Mine.
It got closed down after it collapsed but before then, it went down 692m! From our elevation, that meant it went down past sea-level. It was mind-boggling to imagine how they managed to dig these shafts back then, but I’m glad I wasn’t in it when it collapsed.
On our way back down to the van, we came across this little guy digging for worms…
He had absolutely no fear of us whatsoever and even came right up next to me so that I could take that photo. At least, I thought that was why until he pecked the ground and came away with a juicy worm.
We also came across another fantail right at the end of the path. As with the other ones we’ve seen, this one didn’t seem to mind being around us and he even flew around for a bit to give us a bit of a show. The more we see them, the more we love their little characters and the way they move about.
After our sightseeing, the day was getting on so we decided to make use of the local pool again to have our showers. This time we also went for a swim as well, although neither of us did many lengths after our day of walking.
Side note: I had a funny encounter when I was showering before getting into the pool. A small boy came into the changing rooms to go to the toilet and asked me, “What are you doing?” I told him I was showering, to which he responded with every kid’s favourite question, “Whyyy?” I said I was rinsing off before going into the pool which he clearly wasn’t interested in because he then said, “I came in to go to the toilet.” I’d already figured this out because he was mid-flow while we were talking. He finished up and then announced, “I’m going back in the pool, now.” I replied, “Me, too.” and there ended one of the best conversations I’ve ever had.
Once we’d freshened up, we drove on down to our picturesque little campsite at the bottom of town and made dinner. Our evening wasn’t over yet, though.
One of the first things we’d noticed earlier on in the day — besides the old wild-west style of the main street — was that the local hotel was having a pub quiz that evening. Anna and I are generally pretty shocking at pub quizzes — our go-to team name is 2nd to Last; we like to set the bar low but leave a little room for optimism — but we like to give them a go anyway.
When we had booked a table earlier in the day, the barman had explained that tonight’s quiz was extra special because they would be raising funds for the children at the local karate club to fly to a competition in Sydney. As it turned out, basically the whole town was there. From what we could gather, the quiz isn’t usually that busy so things started out a little bit hectic.
Anna and I started off as a team on our own until a nearby table kindly offered for us to join them. This is when we really started to get just how small Reefton was; our teammates consisted of the local nurse, the local copper and his partner, and the local ambulance driver — thanks very much Marie, Emma, Cam, and Don for adopting us!
Other teams included the teachers, the supermarket staff, the local millionaire and his gang, and pretty much the rest of the town. It was a very strange experience being somewhere where everybody literally did know each other, and every type of person you need to run a town was there too.
We had a fun night — despite two drinks coming to $22! — and felt like we’d been part of a proper Kiwi experience by the end of it. We even managed to answer a few of the questions.
That just about sums up our time in Reefton except for one final thing that happened the next morning.
We left the campsite in search of a fresh water tap that was signposted to be nearby. We struggled to find it at first so we drove slowly up the road to see if we could see it. Another signpost directed us into a motorhome park/public land area.
We weren’t sure if we were allowed to use the tap there as it was hard to tell if it was part of the park or not, so I went to ask at the office. I explained all of this to the guy that met me, and after he found out that we had stayed at the freedom camping ground down the road, he told me — no joke — to f*ck off!
Personally, I thought this was a wee bit of an overreaction. We had a bit of a back-and-forth while I tried to explain about the signs that led us there and that I was just coming in to ask if we could use the tap. He continued to tell me to f*ck off as well as something along the lines of “nothing’s free in Kansas”. It was all quite amusing really, but we just left and went to ask at the i-SITE where the drinking water was.
It was while we were there and they suggested that we go to where we had just been that we needed up telling them about our experience. It turned out that we weren’t the first to have a run-in with him — he made one woman cry in the past — and the staff asked if we’d be happy to write an incident report so that they could actually try and do something about it.
I typed up what had happened and before we left, the staff gave us two souvenir bags for free as an apology on behalf of the town which was really nice.
The whole ordeal was a weird ending to our time there, but it was more amusing than anything else, and we weren’t going to let it ruin the great time we’d had in Reefton.
