Continuing up the West Coast with the Hannahs, our next stop was the Woods Creek Track, a hiking trail near Greymouth, in the 19th century Gold Rush area. The track goes through temperate rain forest laced with tunnels engineered and built by Chinese immigrants. The story sounds a little like our own West Coast, but the mining technique was quite different. The miners tunneled under ancient riverbeds where they hoped to scrape the gold out of the tunnel ceiling -- and sometimes succeeded. The stonework supporting these tunnels is quite remarkable -- as is the rainforest itself. (Central Otago had a river-panning gold rush more like California.)
The first picture shows the entrance to one of the mining tunnels. The second is a section of ceiling inside a tunnel, with the famed New Zealand weta on the left and glow worm insect traps on the right. Weta is a family of arachnids found only in NZ and older than the dinosaurs -- essentially unchanged in 100 million years. There are 60 species of cave weta alone and many other types as well. Glow worms are found in certain caves all over New Zealand -- they attract their prey by simulating a starry sky and fooling insects into believing they are outdoors.
Ferns and other flora ...
The fantail, seen almost everywhere we went ...
And the piece de resistance: red, white, and blue mushrooms!
