Waihi Day 10

Tuesday 1^st April 2025

Day 10 – Waihi

Had to set an alarm for 6am (ouch) to be sure Geoff got to work on time today.  It was his first day of delivering QAQC training for the geology department at Oceana Gold. It was dark.  The sun doesn’t poke through until 7:30am.

On the other hand, for me it was a day of exploring. I ventured downtown in search of the visitor information centre, known locally in NZ as the iSite. They were very helpful and I decided to purchase a combination ticket for the Martha Gold Mine tour and the Gold Discovery Centre.  With departure time being set for 1pm I went off in search of a coffee.  Turns out there are quite a number of choices so that was easy. I spent a couple of hours wandering around in and out of the shops, taking a few photos here and there of buildings, street art and bronze statues depicting characters of yesteryear.

The Martha tour only had 2 passengers, so we had a great tour of the mine site, stepping in behind the locked gates. First stop was to the edge of the Martha pit which was originally Martha Hill or Pukewa.  Gold was first discovered here in 1878 by John McCombie and Robert Lee. Failing to make a go of it after a year they abandoned their hopes of striking it rich and a newcomer, William Nicoll pegged a claim and named it Martha. Underground mining commenced in 1879 and continued through until 1952. During that time the mine produced about 174,000 kg of gold and 1,193,000 kg of silver from over 12 million tonnes of ore.

Mining recommenced in 1987 and continues today with production expected to continue for at least another 10 years.

Whilst on the edge of the pit we witnessed a drone survey of the waste rock stockpile on the pit floor.  It is undertaken once a month.  Next stop was to the core yard, mill and conveyor systems then on up to the tailings dams. It was a great overview of the operation during the 2 ½ hours.

Back at the info centre I continued my wanderings through the Gold Discovery centre.  They have laid out the history of the discovery of gold with some short films and miniature working models of the various steps in the mining and processing of the ore.

As I had discovered today, dining in Waihi is limited and to get a decent meal everyone was recommending that we should drive on down to Waihi Beach.  Considering that we had already dined at the best that Waihi Beach had to offer the night before I pressed them further.  There were only 3 choices worth mentioning and two of those were takeaways.  So we ended up at the white pub (The Stirling) at the top end of town.  The fish and chips and my steak were OK.