Being on a geology tour, we had to visit a mine or two. Coromandel is rich in resources. In fact, they had their own gold rush around about the same time as the Australian one in the 19th Century. Nowadays the only kind of mining that’s really viable is the open cut mine. This one in Waihi extracts mostly silver, and it’s actually very small compared to the giant iron ore mines in Australia.

Perhaps there may be a future miner/engineer/geologist among this lot?