THAMES

Thames is the nearest town to Te Puru. In its heyday, at the end of the 19th century, it had 20,000 inhabitants and over 100 pubs! WHY? Gold miners flocked to the town as rich  veins of gold were discovered in the quartz. Today there are more like 7,000 people resident here, and there are far fewer watering-holes, but the main street has the feel of a wild-west town complete with hitching posts for the horses (now cars)
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The 'Junction'. It has the look from outside of a gun-slingers' saloon. Inside there are photos of Thames, and the Junction, in the 1890s looking remarkably familiar to the street you've just walked in from. Today there's a bar and a  restaurant inside, ably assisted by Dan Wetherill who has  a holiday job there between university semesters.

A regular part of our visits to Thames (of course) is a visit to a great coffee shop called Chequers. Kiwis have different names for their coffees: 'short blacks' and 'long blacks' are espressos, single and double; 'flat whites' are strong coffee, really strong, with plenty of milk and a leaf design on the milky top. The guy in Chequers agreed to teach us how to do the leaf  IF we did the washing up! We declined.
Being creatures of habit, we sit outside in the little courtyard and have a bowl(!) of flat white each.

At one end of the main street is a pub/restaurant called the Brian Buru. Sue was fascinated to know how a place on the other side of the world got named after the ancient king of Ireland. After asking inside (no help), a trip to the local library (very helpful but amazingly not used to being asked about it) and a bit of a trawl on the net, we discovered that it is the earliest Irish pub in New Zealand, originally named the Reefer's Arms but renamed in the 1870s by the Twohill family (Irish name). Many Irish went to New Zealand after the Famine, and many flocked to gold sites for work and fortune. Leeds University even runs an undergraduate module on it! If you're interested in finding out more, have a look at:

http://www.freepages.history.rootweb.ancestry.com/

www.1stexamcram.com/FamilyTreeLab

There are many beautiful buildings in Thames. This house (now a B and B) could have come out of "Gone With The Wind".


No sign of Scarlett O'Hara or Clark Gable on the day we visited.

We were invited along to the birthday party of one of Nick and Lin's neighbours. A good evening and a great chance to get local tips on where to visit.



Happy Birthday Pete.

At the end of our first week another cyclone hit the coast causing some flooding and landslips as the water from the heavy rain poured down the hills and mountains. 
As you can see this caused some road closures...

Nick viewing the damage

View from the drive of a house that needed to be evacuated in case the cliff collapsed further.