By Geena Paul
SWINGBRIDGE (New Zealand): Heard about the Buller River in New Zealand. It has been a tourist attraction for years and with the swine flu hitting the country recently tourism has been very low this area.

But, something else is drawing people to this remote place in South Island of New Zealand — gold. Buller river is one of the country’s longest rivers, it flows for 170 km from Lake Rotoiti through the Buller Gorge and into the Tasman Sea near the town of Westport.

As Rotoiti itself is fed by the Travers River it can be claimed that the Buller’s source is at the headwaters of the Travers, on the northern slopes of Mount Travers in the Saint Arnaud Range.

The Buller River upstream from Murchison along with the Mangles River used to be popular for whitewater kayaking and recreational fishing.



But, things are changing fast nowadays. The river is now popular for gold diggers. After the rush for gold in California and Brazil, where Amazon forests are being ruined by gold diggers, the new spot in the gold hunters’ is New Zealand’s Buller River.

The city of Nelson is close to the centre of New Zealand. It lies at the shore of Tasman Bay, at the northern end of the South Island, and is the administrative centre of the Nelson region.

Nelson is a centre for arts and crafts, but this town is now the base camp for several people who come hunting for gold in the Buller River.

Thanks to the global economic crisis and the gold prices above $900 an ounce, Nelson is witnessing more than usual visitors nowadays.

From Nelson to Murchison people travel by plane or road and they reach the Buller River with enough paraphernalia to scoop gold from the riverbed, which is full of gold flakes.

Before you get to the area where gold flakes are found you have to cross the swingbridge across the deep chasm — the longest in New Zealand at 110m long and 17m high.

The land on the other side of the bridge is like an open-air museum of gold prospecting in New Zealand.

Amid the regenerating bush you can see tracks which pass lengths of the pipeline the old miners used to bring in water to sluice for gold and great trenches gouged away in the process.

You can also get views of the crack in the gorge wall which sits above the epicentre of the great 1929 Murchison Earthquake, the site of the vanished mining settlement of White’s Creek and the remnants of the ambitious plan to divert the river through a tunnel and expose all the gold on its bed.

When you pan in the river the crucial advice fro experts is that gold sinks. So, you have to find a crevice full of gravel and mud that has been there for a long time and scrape right to the bottom. It’s in the stuff down you will find gold.

With a lot of stories flooding the internet on gold digging in Buller River, more and more people are now rushing to this spot in search of the yellow metal.

Post your comment  (0)

Connect:

Post to Twitter

Post to Facebook