Mapua

Thursday and Friday last week I made a flying visit to Mapua, near Nelson, to catch up with my work assisting the clean-up of the former Fruitgrower's Chemical Company site.

Mapua is a lovely-enough place, but unfortunately it's somewhat overrun by hippies, Germans, patchouli oil, and abominable art. Actually, there's nothing much to distinguish it from the rest of the Greater Nelson and Tasman region, aside possibly from the 30-year legacy of the chemical-dump and it's associated health hazards. There's also a proper "naturalist" colony somewhere about.

But I fear I am being somewhat petty; the sun was shining, as it is wont to do, and the birds were singing, and you could hardly hear the Environmental Decontamination Ltd. plant rumbling away barely 100 metres away as it did it's thing; it's thing being to treat truckloads of contaminated material using a world-beating NZ-invented nil-environmental-impact treatment method of blasting the soil with ball bearings and glass marbles until all of the nasty chemical compounds break down. At the right we have my view of the treatment plant, taken from the stylish temporary-office-in-a-container on the site.

At some point on the Friday afternoon, somewhat overwhelmed by the glorious weather and the spectacular scenery, I went and stood on the front balcony of the world-reknowned Smokehouse restaurant, and shot for you, dear readers, this panorama:



It's a truly magnificent vista, as we sweep around from the view of the island directly opposite The Smokehouse, across the beautiful Waimea estuary, and fetching-up on the shore-frontage of what has been shown to be one of the most contaminated sites in all of New Zealand.

The coffee at The Smokehouse is truly some of the most awful I have ever tasted, but it's not the coffee they are known for. They are famous for their smoked fish of various sorts; all, presumably, caught right there in the estuary, and all, presumably, [sarcasm] relatively-free of the Aldrin, Lindane, Dieldrin, DDT, and other highly toxic dioxin pesticides which have been leaching into the water for at least the last 30 years. [/sarcasm]

On the Thursday night I got unfeasibly drunk with my brother, sister, and some of their friends - it turned into one of those "stay up all night and drink everything in the house" nights - and spent an uncomfortable couple of hours face down on the couch fighting a losing battle with the urge to expel the highly-acidic toxic-feeling liquids in my stomach. Eventually I gave up. Not really any kind of remediation, but a definite and successful decontamination, at the very least.