About Punakaiki Area

Punakaiki is the gateway to the dramatic limestone country of the Paparoa National Park. It lies halfway between Greymouth and Westport on one of the most spectacular coastal highways in New Zealand.

The Punakaiki township has a National Park i-SITE Visitor Centre, café and tearooms, craft shop and plenty of car parking. The surrounding area is scattered with accommodation – upmarket hotel apartments, boutique bed & breakfasts, self-catering motel units, a campervan and camping ground, and backpacker accommodation.

Tourism activities include canoe adventures, horse trekking, caving and guided tours to name just a few. Punakaiki has many colourful local crafts people – jewellers, carvers, painters and potters.

Within a few minutes drive of the Punakaiki township are many walks for various fitness levels – take a 10 minute stroll along the beach or equip yourself for a overnight trip into the heart of the National Park.

The Coast Road

Punakaiki is located near the centre of the “Coast Road”, one of the most spectacular coastal drives in the world – in the top ten according to the Lonely Planet Guidebook. The roads are well sealed and to State Highway standard all the way. To allow time to stop and enjoy some of the walks and coastal views, we recommend allowing much longer than the drive times given in most travel guides.

The Pancake Rocks and Blowholes

The Pancake Rocks that Punakaiki is famous for, are limestone formations that began forming 30 million years ago, when lime-rich fragments of dead marine creatures were deposited on the seabed, then overlaid by weaker layers of soft mud and clay.

About Charleston

This charming small settlement today is totally at odds with its wild past when it boasted over 80 hotels to service a thirsty population of goldminers from all over the world.  Today it is the headquarters for NorWest Adventures who run world class activities centred around the amazing cave formations and creatures including glowworms who live in the Nile River Caves.  Read more about these tours on this site under Adventure Activities.

There are some beautiful walks here (see Walks) and river swimming, fishing, great food and drinks at the local pub and a range of accommodation from motel type to backpackers, campground and beachfront holiday cottages.  And don’t miss the old stamping battery at Mitchells Gully Gold Mine – it was specially designed to extract gold from iron sand – as most of the goldmining around here was exactly that, alluvial gold in black sand.  Most stamping batteries are used to crush quartz rock to extract the gold from the rock.

Some Punakaiki and Charleston History:

Punakaiki means ("a spring of food" to the Maori).  It is likely that early Maori settlement of this area was relatively sparse and coastal because of the difficult and steep ranges inland but there is not a lot of archeological evidence to find, because of the erosion in this area.

Certainly in the 1860s when Charles Heaphy and Thomas Brunner led the first search into this area by Europeans, looking for rich farmland, they found only isolated settlements at the mouth of rivers.

But the history here is famous for a number of funny facts and firsts!

Black Sam, White Sam, French Sam, and another Sam!

Punakaiki's history included gold seekers, headed by the Sams Party known as "Black Sam, White Sam, French Sam, and another Sam."  The Inland Pack Track was in fact, created in the mid-1800s so that goldminers could move more easily through the area.

The Westland Petrel nests only here.

Following his 1945 radio talk about petrels, biologist Robert Falla was contacted by pupils from the Barrytown School to say that the birds in a nearby colony laid their eggs several months earlier than he had described. This led to the discovery of the unique Westland petrel, Procellaria westlandica, which is only known to nest in a small area between Punakaiki and Barrytown.

The birth of Paparoa National Park

Paparoa National Park was established in 1987, Paparoa National Park was one of the first to contain a large area of lowland conifer– broadleaf forest, including distinctive nīkau palms close to the coast.

A short history of Charleston

From the junction of the Buller Gorge road southwards to Charleston, the road passes over a series of flat terraces. These flat areas were originally under the sea, and have gradually been uplifted over thousands of years. Concentrations of fine gold accumulated with black sand along ancient beaches. The area was swarming with gold prospectors in the 1860s and 1870s, and original forest was cleared. There is now little sign of mining activity except at Mitchell Gully mine, open as a tourist attraction, where old tunnels and mining machinery can be seen.

Founded as a gold-mining settlement, Charleston exploded to a population of about 2,200 in early 1868.

The birth of a national shoe business

The rugged country meant that shoes and boots constantly needed repair or replacement, and even small towns had a shoe shop. Robert Hannah opened his first shoe shop at Charleston in 1868. His business expanded, and he eventually became New Zealand’s largest shoe manufacturer and retailer. Hannahs was still a major nationwide shoe retailer in the early 2000s.

Transport Options:

With no airport, the only transport option to and from Punakaiki and Charleston is by road, either rental car or one of several shuttles, charter bus companies and regular services such as InterCity and bus tour companies.  These do change both in terms of brand, and timetable so check with the Greymouth or Westport I-Sites for more information and up-to-date schedules.