Is Karamea the next Golden Bay?
Karamea at the top of the West Coast is one of New Zealand’s most isolated communities, but as tourists and newcomers discover its charm, could it be the next Golden Bay? Joanne Carroll talks to people of Karamea about its future.
Situated at the northernmost tip of the West Coast, Karamea is a haven of rainforest, sea, limestone caves and whisky-coloured rivers. It is a 90-minute rugged drive north from Westport over craggy bluffs, with sweeping views of the Tasman. Karamea is the gateway to the Heaphy Track and the stunning Oparara Arches, and recently gained more than $14 million in Government funding to help it on its way to a sustainable future.
But most of its 730 locals seem keen to make sure it keeps its untapped, isolated, small-town friendly vibe.
As you walk down the street at Market Cross, the sun is shining, people are sitting outside in the sunshine at Vinnie’s Cafe, or popping in and out of the Four Square and a yurt selling locally grown produce and community-created crafts. There are two real estate offices, an i-Site, a garage and a hardware store selling everything from kids’ toys to plants and sunnies. Further down on Waverley St is a sole-charge police station, a fire station, area school, library and museum.
Tania and Ed Tinomana, who were born and raised in Karamea, have seen many changes over the years. Their hopes for the future would be to attract more tourists to their slice of paradise, as well as having an economy which could provide jobs for young people wanting to stay in Karamea.
They bought The Last Resort hotel, bar and accommodation seven years ago and struggle to find hospitality staff at the largely seasonal business, relying on former university students returning home for summers to keep the place ticking.
‘‘People say it’s like Takaka used to be before it got too commercialised. We are starting to see some development. It’s a good place to bring up our two children. It’s a pretty sheltered childhood. We sent them to boarding school so they could experience the big world out there,’’ Tania said.
She had noticed there was more division in the community in recent years than there used to be. The most divisive subject locals debate around the bar is environmental protection versus development and economic growth, she said.
She was brought up on a farm in Karamea, while Ed’s father owned the last operating sawmill in the town, which closed down in 1999. The school roll was about 240 when they were growing up, now it is closer to 70.
Ed worries that there are not enough jobs to keep young people in the town.
‘‘Young people especially move away, there’s nothing much for them. We were lucky growing up there was always good jobs. There used to be four mills, the dairy factory, forestry, two bush crews; a lot of employment, but that all shut down. It all disappeared by the early 2000s and a lot of people, families, left. Farms got bigger, people buying out their neighbours’ farm, so that had a big effect, but we’ve had different people moving in so it balances out,’’ Ed said.
It has since seen the arrival of retirees, or some younger people moving to Karamea for the lifestyle and fishing.
Locals say with the arrival of 4G wireless internet in the town last year, it is possible to work in Karamea and have clients all over the country, like the local award-winning architect and the music teacher who teaches online to students around the world.
Mechanical engineer Nathan Young moved to Karamea six weeks ago from Whakatane with his wife, Bridie, and their four young children.
‘‘We’d been living in Whakatane for eight years. We did like it. The house was great and I loved my job but I worked in the Mount and I had an hour commute each way. We sort of felt that time was slipping by and we had often talked about buying a bush block and I wanted to start my own business,’’ he said.
They began searching the country for their ideal spot and Karamea was it.
‘‘The primary reason was we could ditch the mortgage and buy our land freehold and have money left over to build, get rid of my commute, live in a beautiful place, take up fishing, get back into surfing and go tramping in the national park that is on our doorstep.’’
Young hopes to launch his freelance engineering business, which with good internet in Karamea is possible, he says.
Two of their four children have started at Karamea Area School, which has been promised a rebuild by the Government. It is deemed by the Ministry of Education as the fourth most isolated school in New Zealand.
When Education Minister Chris Hipkins announced a $5m project to redevelop the 70-year-old Decile 4 school in 2017, he promised it would be completed by 2020. It hasn’t even begun yet.
Ministry of Education head of education infrastructure service Kim Shannon said the school needed more work than was initially anticipated.
She said the budget and scope was increased to a complete rebuild, at the cost of $9m, in April 2019. Design work was due to finish in mid-2020 and then a construction timeline would be finalised.
According to Infometrics, Karamea has 111 businesses,199 jobs and a GDP of $26.8m. Dairy and tourism are its main drivers.
Development West Coast (DWC) has begun actively marketing the Oparara Valley, with its four-million-year-old Oparara Arches and 14km Honeycomb caves, as one of the six West Coast icons.
The 15km gravel McCallums Mill Rd, leading to the Arches, is notoriously dangerous and once saw 18 crashes in just eight weeks. There has been a surge in the popularity of the attraction in recent times, with visitor numbers tripling in 10 years. The popular natural formation attracts about 15,000 sightseers annually but DOC estimates that will increase by 10 per cent over the next five years.
DWC chief executive Heath Milne said the aim was not ‘‘mass tourism, rather high-value visitors who appreciate and respect our unique natural environment’’.
‘‘We aspire to work closely with local operators and the Department of Conservation to ensure a holistic balance between visitor numbers and environmental protection,’’ he said.
The Government promised a $5.6m upgrade of the access road and walking tracks at Oparara in 2018 but the project has been delayed after environmentalists raised
concerns that a mooted and later abandoned plan for a giant moa installation would turn the area into a ‘‘theme park’’.
DOC’s tourism pressures strategic projects manager Aideen Larkin said the upgrade was taking longer than expected because of environmental, archaeological and geotechnical assessments that needed to be done to ensure any work did not harm the special values of the area.
‘‘We are in the investigation and design phase and are estimating it will be another three to four months, including consenting. This, however, brings us near the bird breeding seasons and we need to work through what and when work can be undertaken to avoid disturbing any nesting activity of the resident population of whio and kiwi,’’ she said.
The plan was to improve the safety of the McCallums Mill access road, including sealing a few steep sections, re-routing the archway walking track away from potential falling rocks and sensitive plant life, building a new walkway, installing monitoring equipment to improve security at the Honeycomb Hill Caves Specially Protected Area and upgrading toilets.
‘‘Any work that goes ahead will be designed with the environmental impacts in mind and how to reduce these impacts. Also management plans will be developed for the construction phase to manage environmental impacts from the work,’’ Larkin said.
Barry Chalmers, who sits on the Oparara Valley Trust and the Karamea Estuary Enhancement Project committees, says the investment is long overdue.
‘‘It’s been a bit of a mission unfortunately. If the money had stayed with the Oparara Trust we would have had it finished. This pot of money went around and around and God, it is frustrating. There has been a delay because of the environmental assessments that need to be done and that’s fine. We’re going to get there,’’ he said.
McCallums Mill Rd was a logging road built for logging trucks, not cars.
‘‘We get thousands of cars up there and it’s just not safe. Some tourists have never driven on a gravel road before. Some people think it’s a race track. That’s probably not going to change but there’ll be passing bays and the corners sealed,’’ he said.
Chalmers’ committee recently unveiled a Government-funded $145,000 bronze statue of a hokioi (Haast’s eagle) at the estuary wetland area, which they hope to develop with plantings and walkway. The bird has been extinct for 600 years, but Chalmers explains it is the spiritual guardian of the area. Its bones were found in the Honeycomb caves in the 1980s, where the Oparara Valley Trust runs twice-daily guided tours.
Originally from Wellington, Chalmers moved to Karamea to work in the New Zealand Forest Service, which later became DOC, in 1969.
‘‘In those days there were four sawmills going and we had a football team, hockey team, but it’s slowly building up again. Tourism is our future. Farming is too up and down,’’ he said.
Chalmers, who has written four books on the history of Karamea, says there’s no place he’d rather live.
‘‘It’s neat. There’s a big variety of people here now, retired and young ones. A traffic jam is four cars on the main street,’’ he said.
You can buy a tidy threebedroom house for $250,000 or 10 acres of bush for $165,000 in Karamea.
Lynda Pope moved to Karamea three years ago from Marlborough, and works in real estate.
‘‘I bought a property here in 2003 when properties were cheap and nobody wanted to live here. There wasn’t really much known about Karamea except that it was at the end of the road. I thought give it 20 years and it will take off. It’s about 20 years later now and it is taking off,’’ she said.
‘‘Prices are rising and valuations are rising. Karamea is doing what Golden Bay did 20 years ago. It’s still relatively affordable and we have people moving here from all over the country.’’
She chose Karamea for its microclimate. With more than 2000 sunshine hours a year, it is the sunniest spot on the West Coast.
She said an upgrade to the Oparara access road was long
‘‘It’s been a bit of a mission unfortunately. If the money had stayed with the Oparara Trust we would have had it finished. There has been a delay because of the environmental assessments that need to be done and that’s fine. We’re going to get there.’’
Barry Chalmers Oparara Valley Trust and Karamea Estuary Enhancement Project committees member
overdue. She organises a trail run every year in the valley.
‘‘There’s money in the pot that is still sitting in Wellington they keep promising but it hasn’t been released. We are restricted in the size of buses that we can get up there and it will be great for our event to be able to get bigger buses up there if they seal the steep sections. Some people want it and others don’t. We just have to find the balance,’’ she said.
Karamea butcher and helicopter pilot Tony Ibbotson worries about the Government getting the balance wrong for Karamea. He fears proposed policies like changes to the whitebait fishery and the Oparara upgrade would change the fabric of the place. He believes access to the Oparara should be restricted to guided tours, in guided vehicles.
‘‘If it was overdone it would be wrecked quite easily. You have to be very careful. [Karamea] is quite unique but it’s growing quite quickly now... We’re getting a lot of people coming through because it is the end of the road. There is so much untouched environment here through the Oparara Basin and the national park, the walks, the sea, the fishing. It’s just magic. I’ve lived in a lot of places in New Zealand and there’s no other place I’d rather live than here. It’s perfect,’’ he said.
Ibbotson has worked in many jobs since moving to Karamea and built The Last Resort complex, a cafe as well as restaurants in Westport and the yurt in Karamea, where he sells his speciality meats, which he also sends to wholesalers in the North Island for distribution to restaurants.
‘‘I came here in 1981 as a commercial fisherman and fell in love with the place. I came here with a bowler hat and long blonde hair and straight away I was classed as just another bloody hippy. Over the years that’s all changed. The people have accepted people from the outside far more than what they did when I first arrived here,’’ he said.
Paul Murray agrees. He is Australian and spent 10 years as a journalist in Tokyo before moving to Karamea with his wife in 2004. They have two children, Winston, 5, and Diva, 8.
‘‘We like to call it the start of the road. It’s a place you can be free. You can be yourself. The community are very accepting. It’s a microcosm of the world. There is someone with every ideology and doctrine out there living here. It makes it a very interesting place,’’ he said.
The couple ran Rongo’s backpackers for 15 years before closing it down last year.
Murray puts the demise of the backpackers down to the rise of AirBnB and freedom camping.
‘‘We were making money but only just. And we were working hard for long hours so we decided it wasn’t worth it. I then got a job in real estate and that’s just taken off,’’ he said.
He said properties were getting back up to the value they had been in 2008 before the closure of the Buller coal mines and the global financial crisis.
Murray spends his spare time foraging for kawakawa, and hopes to become the first commercial supplier of kawakawa pepper.
No one in Karamea spoken to by Stuff was in favour of a longmooted loop road linking Karamea to Tasman. Former mayor Garry Howard had most recently touted the idea of making a road through the Kahurangi National Park along the Wangapeka Track. Current mayor Jamie Cleine supports the idea.
‘‘I think a loop road would be brilliant, but I won’t hold my breath that it will happen any time soon. I don’t think there is the political or environmental appetite for it,’’ he said.
He said Karamea was a great place, unique and really quite remote.
‘‘I see Karamea as having a bright future. They are getting their fair share of tourism up there. It’s not invasive tourism, they seem to be enjoying the experience. There will be growth in that area with the iconic Oparara area. I don’t think they aspire to grow into a large bustling metropolis any time soon, I think they are very happy with the Karamea lifestyle. I think they are quite comfortable where they are at.’’