One Man's Magnificent Obsession & The Heart Of Gold

Two spirals, three short tunnels, five reversing points, several large viaducts and twenty six years to build!

Hello from sunny Whakatane, in the Bay Of Plenty. We have just arrived here after spending the past few days on the Coromandel Peninsula in Whitianga where we saw some beautiful and interesting sites.

Probably the most interesting was New Zealand's only narrow-gauge mountain railway along with a working pottery and wild life sanctuary.

Barry Brickell, one of New Zealand's most prolific and best known potters and railway enthusiasts, has almost single-handedly built a 3km long narrow gauge railway through the bush on 60 acres. Track laying began in 1975 and over the following 26 years he built the railway line, the rail cars and the Eyefull Tower, a viewing building at the top of the mountain, with his own two hands and not much else!

There are five major viaducts and five reversing points up the main line as well as two horseshoe spirals, on the route to the summit. The double deck viaduct is unique. In a return trip on the railway, trains pass over it four times in different directions on both levels. The two levels are connected by a spiral all in very rugged, forested terrain. Its construction alone took two years.

Barry Brickell is also an ardent conservationist, driven by the need to restore the land and its uniquely magnificent indigenous kauri forests. The early British colonists and colonial governments strove to replace forest with farm land for economic survival, but the price was very high by ecological standards. Vast areas of magnificent native forest were destroyed.

Proceeds from the railway fund this huge scheme to replace the native forest cover and arrest soil erosion for all time. To date over nine thousand Kauri trees have been replanted.

Today we drove the east side of the Coromandel Peninsula to Whakatane, the sunniest place in New Zealand.

Along the way we stopped in Waihi , New Zealand's "Heart Of Gold" to see The Martha Mine, an open pit gold mine. Viewing the open pit from above was fascinating, imagining how many people have worked in the mine over the last 150 years and also imagining how much earth was moved and crushed to mine the minerals.

Unfortunately, we didn't discover any gold ourselves so we have to be satisfied with the pictures we took!

Next we continue our journey along the east coast of the North Island......