Mōtū River is a major waterway in the eastern portion of the
North Island
The North Island, also officially named Te Ika-a-Māui, is one of the two main islands of New Zealand, separated from the larger but much less populous South Island by the Cook Strait. The island's area is , making it the world's 14th-largest ...
of
New Zealand
New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...
. It rises on the slopes of
Maungahaumi on the southern side of the
Raukumara Range south of
Opotiki, heads east and cuts its way through the range, where its important tributaries merge with it, and empties into the
Bay of Plenty
The Bay of Plenty ( mi, Te Moana-a-Toi) is a region of New Zealand, situated around a bight of the same name in the northern coast of the North Island. The bight stretches 260 km from the Coromandel Peninsula in the west to Cape Runaw ...
to the north.
The Māori name Mōtu means ''cut off'', ''isolated''. This refers to the district around the headwaters, which since ancient times has been considered to be in the middle of nowhere because of the thickness of the forests which surrounded it.
The river passes through mostly uninhabited hill country, very steep and still thickly covered in rainforest. It is much used for adventure tourism (jet-boating and white-water rafting). The first modern traverse of the river, from the Motu Falls to its mouth, was in 1920 by the Fisher brothers and S. Thorburn, and this was re-enacted in 2013 by Kevin Biggar and Jamie Fitzgerald in series 2 of the "First Crossings" TV series.
A mid-20th century proposal to dam the river for
hydroelectricity
Hydroelectricity, or hydroelectric power, is Electricity generation, electricity generated from hydropower (water power). Hydropower supplies one sixth of the world's electricity, almost 4500 TWh in 2020, which is more than all other Renewabl ...
was rejected.
[GW Gray, 1954. An Account of the Motu River Hydro Investigations. ''Whakatane Historical Society Newsletter'' 15/2:140-142]
References
External links
* First Crossings TV series links
TV OneFacebook page
an
website
Rivers of the Bay of Plenty Region
Rivers of the Gisborne District
Rivers of New Zealand
{{BayofPlenty-river-stub