With almost as much stock outside his shop as in it, the owner of the 'antique' shop in Kurow, provided some entertainment during our 2-night stay in Kurow.
Despite his shop being criticised as a fire hazard by the authorities, he spent an hour and a half every morning and evening setting up and dismantling the displays outside. I am not a big junk shop fan but curiosity got the better of me and we paid it a visit.
The shop had everything from flags of every nation to crockery, cutlery, scientific contraptions, victorian dental and medical kits and more than 60,000 books, from behind which, the owner, an old, eccentric looking guy, appeared. We tried to make conversation and asked if he had any rocks or fossils. We got a straight 'No' in reply. So we asked if he had any hammers, to which we got another blunt 'No'. We felt that they weren't unreasonable questions; the shop was absolutely crammed full, albeit in a disorganised way, with everything you could think of, except rocks and hammers. Presumably feeling that he should offer further explanation, he then said. 'It's mostly books I've got and everything else is just stuff left by campers.' We looked around and wondered to ourselves what kind of campers they'd had in Kurow that left 3 old army trucks. Anyway, we gave up at this point and went to buy some chips. We sat on a bench opposite, enjoying the sun and watched as not one other person entered his shop.
Feeling a little sorry for the guy and positive that he'd have what I was looking for; I abandoned my chips and went back inside. "Do you have any books on New Zealand wildlife?" I enquired with a friendly welcoming smile and totally unsuspecting of the reply that followed. 'New Zealand doesn't have any wildlife to call it's own except the kiwi and who'd want to be associated with a dumb, blind bird like the kiwi that can't even walk properly." I thanked him for his help and retreated to my bag of chips.
There wasn't a lot to do in Kurow and I think we'd just exhausted the only tourist attraction, so we drove to Duntroon, 18km down the road, in search of the Maerewhenua River and its rattling rocks. The rattling rocks are geodes, hollow rocks which sometimes have another piece of rock or crystal loose inside them. They are not very easy to spot and we spent about 4 hours walking up the river bed in search of them before Tony finally found one. I was about 100m away and by the time I got to him, he'd rattled it to death and broken it. All that was left in his hand was a rock with a hole.
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