Murchison to Pancake Rocks by Miriam

Miriam again. We woke up to a beautiful day and joined Shirley, Merve and Glenn for breakfast. Merve made a delicious juice – mixture of kiwi, pear and some other fruit I can’t remember. We also had bacon and pancakes available if we wanted. I chose bacon. Apparently the pancakes were a special treat because this was Glenn’s second day. I don’t know about the bacon. Delicious, fresh, home-made bread was also available.

Then we left for our rafting trip. Before going out, the rafting guides clothed us - heavy duty wetsuit, separate polartec and fleece uppers, both so worn and torn I wasn’t sure they would do the job so I left on my dry top as well. The wet suit was a little big and I needed Harvey’s help to pull it up so the crotch stayed above my knees. Over all this we wore a spray shirt to keep us dry. The piece de resistance was the life jacket - they either had small or large - small was too small and large was too large – so large it was. It was very stiff and hung down to my hips and crawled up my neck. I could not bend in it and felt like that little kid in The Christmas Story all bundled up to go out to play but not able to move.
Joining Harvey, Glen and me were the guide’s father and a young man from England. We headed out to the raft on the Buller River in the Buller Gorge. Harvey and Glenn volunteered to be in front. I had a hard time getting into the raft because I couldn’t bend or lift my legs. We received paddling instructions, what to do if we tipped, practiced a bit and were on our way. I was way too warm until we hit the first rapid. Each rapid was fun but short. Most were done quickly. At one point Harvey and Glen got out of the boat to float with feet first through a small rapid. No one else wanted to brave the cold water. I might have tried, I like to think, but I wasn’t sure I could move my arms and legs once I hit the water and I wasn’t sure I could bend the life jacket to bring my legs up. We went over a waterfall and the guide slightly lost control of the boat as we ricocheted between the rocks on either side of the river. That was fun really. The guide blamed this oopsy on the fact that the three men on one side paddled harder than me and Harvey, the only two on the other side. We had to feel proud that he wasn’t expecting this since we were halfway down the river. ☺
We reached some rocks and we were free to jump in the river from the rocks. There was small, medium and large. Once in the river you needed to swim towards shore where the guide would catch you. The middle rock was about eight meters and the tall one about ten. Everyone jumped but me. Harvey jumped the middle rock. Again, I like to think I would have jumped if I had confidence that once in the river I could move.

All in all the raft trip was a lot of fun but I think I’ll stick to water sports where I can wear a little less - and I may check out the life jackets first. The pull out was a very steep bank and the menfolk had to shove the raft up in stages while I walked along behind. But before I did that I unzipped her my jacket. AHHHHH!!!!!

We have done rafting in the U.S. on several different rivers, and our younger son worked as a river rafting guide in Oregon. We noticed several things about this trip that were different than our previous trips: the cold weather gear that inhibited a lot of movement, the fact that the raft was monitored from the shore by two people from the rafting company, one of whom took photos along the way, and the fact that the raft was put into the river by hand, lowering it down, or carrying it up, very steep, cliff-like river banks.

After the trip we were offered tea or coffee and some biscuits plus we were asked to watch a CD of the pictures they took - which of course was available for purchase. The pictures were good if a little amateurish. At one point we heard the photographer lament an overexposed shot. Harvey and I noticed that since we have been struggling with overexposure ourselves. Naturally everyone bought the CD.

We said our goodbyes and went on our way through a stretch of highway described as paralleling the “tortuous Buller Gorge”. Whoever wrote this section in the Lonely Planet had not traveled from Upper Hutt into Wellington. Harvey breezed through this section and I even felt I could enjoy the scenery and didn’t need to use my willpower to help Harvey drive, so my eyes did not need to be glued to the road. We stopped at a little café on the way for lunch - I had a toasted ham and cheese and Harvey a pannini with weird stuff in it like meat and pineapple.

We passed through the gorge and hit the west coast. More than one person has told us that the stretch of beach between Westport and Franz Joseph glacier is the most scenic in all of New Zealand. We were waiting for our jaws to drop, but they didn’t. We stopped just south of Westport and walked to a lighthouse at the tip of Cape Foulwind. It was beautiful but not that different from home.

We stopped for the night at Punakaiki, where the pancake rocks are, and took the first motel we stopped at. All units have ocean views, some are closer to the beach, and some are accessed via a tunnel and are on the opposite side of the highway. We opted for the cheaper room which was on the opposite side of the highway. For future reference - rooms that front a highway suffer from a lot of road noise. But we did have a beautiful view. We had dinner in the motel’s dining room - it too had a beautiful ocean view. We watched the sun set as we dined on delicious lamb shanks.

We decided to go to the main attraction – pancake rocks - that night to see if it was worth returning to in the morning. This is a park where the limestone is in horizontal layers that vaguely resemble stacked pancakes; those layers have been carved by the sea into tunnels and deep holes with water gushing in. Apparently, if the tide is right, the waves surge into blowholes and spout into the air like geysers. The tide, of course, was not right.

But it was beautiful at night and we decided to return the next morning As we walked back to our car the sun had set and it was quite dark. We couldn’t find the sign we saw on the way in - I do not do well at night and was a little apprehensive until we reached the highway. The path in and out passes through stands of flax that are head height so it is difficult to see ahead especially at night. But with Harvey’s expert path tracking skills we made it ☺ although I had to listen as Harvey make spooky sounds to spoof my apprehension.

We returned to the motel with the road noise. We parked the car on the edge of the parking lot and the headlights picked up a chicken-sized bird with big feet and a long bill pecking for food. We were sure we had spotted the elusive kiwi. We watched it for awhile until it disappeared into the bushes. We went to bed feeling very, very lucky!!!

Murchison by Miriam

Miriam here –

We left Golden Bay today after a home-made breakfast of muesli for Harvey, yoghurt for Miriam and toast with feta cheese and lox for both. Harvey stopped at Takaka to update the blog while Miriam explored the local organic food store and extracted money from the ATM.

Golden Bay attracts artists and hippie-like individuals with a keen interest in the environment. The young man in the organic food store bore a strong resemblance in clothing if nothing else to people we encountered at food co-ops during our college years in Eugene. I overheard a customer ask the young man about a bottle of teriyaki sauce. She had never heard of it and he wasn’t sure what was in it. So I piped up with an explanation. The woman put the bottle down quickly.

We backtracked to Motueka, got gas and planned to eat lunch but couldn’t find parking. We were looking for the i-center to find out the best way out, got lost, got gas and accidentally found the route. So we left without eating and headed for the West coast through Westport and the Buller gorge.

We stopped for lunch in Murchison, a small town surrounded by very pretty hills at the head of the gorge. It is not yet a major tourist attraction but is beginning to get some attention.

It was about 2:20 pm. Harvey ordered a whitebait sandwich (whitebait are tiny little eel-shaped fish about an inch and a half long and an eighth of an inch wide; the fish are mixed with egg, cooked like a pancake and served on a piece for frenchish bread with a lettuce leaf. I ordered the fish and chips, and we both had flat whites. We were lucky. Ten minutes after we arrived the restaurant closed.

After lunch we wandered into the rafting and kayaking shop next door. They offer trips down the Buller river. We were curious because our son Ian used to be a river raft guide and both our sons are white water kayakers.

A young lady with dreadlocks talked to us a bit and suggested we take a trip with them down the river. We had planned to go on to the West coast that day, but we had no schedule to keep and it seemed like it would be fun to raft or kayak a NZ river, so we decided to stay in this beautiful valley for the night. The kayaking was in inflatables and in a calmer part of the river; the rafting was in Buller Gorge and seemed much more appealing. However, the operators would only run the rafting trip if three or more signed up, so we weren’t sure we would get to do the rafting trip.

We left the rafting shop and went to the i-center. With the help of a lady working in the center I preliminarily picked us a B&B to stay at that said it had nice views.

We drove over to check it out. The B&B turned out to be a beautiful lodge with a huge veranda, made almost entirely from two large trees: a Douglas fir and a macrocarpa. The main beams were Douglas fir and gigantic. The floors, paneling and much of the furniture were made from the macrocarpa. The lodge was set on acreage with some cattle, and a view of the river and the mountains surrounding the valley. It is run by a British couple, Shirley and Merve, who have lived there for four years. Our room was beautiful. It was upstairs, spacious, and had a balcony with beautiful views.
It was still early afternoon so we borrowed bikes from the owners and rode out into the countryside. We passed beautiful farms surrounded by hills, and lots of sheep and cattle grazing. There was no traffic. We drove about four or five miles. Harvey’s seat came loose and tilted down toward the back, making biking a very interesting and somewhat painful experience for him, so we turned back.

We stopped at the store, bought some cheese, went back to our room and ate cheese and crackers, sipped wine and watched the sun set.
Oddly, this lodge in the middle of hardly anywhere had free, high-speed internet, so Harvey worked on the blog. After a while I went downstairs and started talking to a man who appeared to be about 40 and was the other occupant that night at the lodge. His name was Glenn, and he was an officer in the U.S. Navy, currently on leave from his assignment in Africa.

Later Shirley came in, Harvey came down, and Merve joined us, and we had a very pleasant evening talking about how Merve and Shirley ended up there, Glenn’s job (his specialty was communications) and this and that. Shirley had told Glenn that we were not sure enough people would sign up for us to take the raft trip, so Glenn signed up to join us. We talked into the night and eventually went upstairs to bed.

Farewell Spit

We woke up, and were amazed, thrilled and delighted to have a perfect, sunny day. We had a leisurely breakfast, got dressed and walked out to the road for our 10:15 pickup for our Farewell Spit tour. Our vehicle turned out to be a medium sized, four wheel drive, bus/truck hybrid that was converted by our tour company. It had great big windows and about seven sets of double seats plus the row in the back.
One of the double seats was taken by a couple, and the rest of the doubles were all occupied by one person. Nobody made any effort to move over except the couple sitting on the large back seat. It wasn’t clear there was enough space for all four of us in the back seat, so Miriam sat in the middle and I sat just in front of her. At first we were kind of bummed because we always sit together, and also because it seemed odd that no one moved over or was welcoming. After a while, however, we realized that the double seats were really small, and we had great views and could easily talk to each other, so we were probably better off than if we had gotten a double seat together.

The tour was advertised as an “eco” tour, and it lived up to its billing. Our driver had been doing tours on Farewell Spit for 20 years; his grandfather was a coal miner who worked near the spit. He knew a whole lot about the wildlife and the history of the area, and had a good sense of humor to boot.

Farewell Spit is unusual because it is a big spit that is entirely sand; there are no rocks under it. It is formed because it is at the junction of two ocean currents; one heading Northeast up the West side of NZ and the other heading Northwest up the East side of NZ. Where they meet the currents clash, the water loses speed, the loss of speed reduces the ability of the current to carry sand, and the sand is deposited on the spit. As a result, the spit is continually growing, kind of like me. It isn’t hardly getting any longer, but it is getting wider.

Only tour companies with permits from the NZ Department of Conservation can go out on the spit, so taking a tour is the only way to see it. It is desolate and beautiful.
We stopped at several placed on our way to the lighthouse at the end of the spit.
The lighthouse was originally constructed in the late 1800s. The current structure is made of iron, and was built about 110 years ago. It originally took three people living out on the spit to keep the lighthouse running. We ate lunch at one of the houses that used to be occupied by one of the lighthouse keepers. It had this signpost and whale skeleton outside it:
On our way back we stopped and climbed one of the sand dunes. The blowing sand makes beautiful designs on the dune surfaces.
We then drove to Cape Farewell, stopping at a small, flat, grassy area at the top of a cliff overlooking the cape. The NZ Department of Conservation has erected a 40 foot long fence at one point on the edge of the cliff to keep humans from falling off. The area is part of a working sheep ranch, and there are sheep grazing all around, including the sections of the cliff top where there is no fence. I guess this means that the NZ Department of Conservation has figured out that sheep are smarter than people.
There is supposed to be a “bush walk” right outside our cottage that goes along the stream and up the hill. We found the stream but couldn’t find the trail. After slipping and stumbling into the creek a couple of times we gave it up as a bad job, came back to the cottage and poured ourselves some wine. I barbecued lamb chops for dinner and made fresh tomatoes with balsamic vinegar dressing; they are practically becoming a staple for us. Miriam worked on our itinerary, I plunked dobro and worked on the blog, and we went to bed early.

Pakawau

We left Marahau, on the Eastern side of Abel Tasman National Park and drove over the mountains to Takaka, the major town servicing that side of the park. We stopped at Harwoods Lookout at the mountain crest, which had beautiful views of the valleys on the East side of the mountains.
It also had odd shaped weathered rocks, and an even odder, visiting lifeform.We checked the i-site in Takaka for directions and ideas of what to do in Golden Bay, and then drove East along the coast to the fishing community of Pohara, which sits right next to the park. The tide was out, exposing long stretches of golden sand under a glowering sky.
We drove back toward Takaka and stopped at a tourist attraction called the labyrinth. It’s an area with extensive rock formations of the type we saw at Harwoods Lookout, with deep clefts and odd shapes. The owners have built trails and made maps that identify different animals and shapes you can see in the rocks. They have also put gnomes, dwarves and similar statues throughout. It’s a bit kitchy but we managed to spend a little over an hour there, although the last fifteen minutes we were mostly just trying to find our way out.

After the labyrinth we stopped at a place that advertised good coffee. We ended up sharing a corn fritter dish that had bacon, avocado and sweet chili sauce. Not only was it really good, it kept us full for a long time.

We passed back through Takaka, picked up groceries, and stopped at Pupu springs. Pupu springs is an upwelling of a very large amount of very clear water; it’s rated as one of the clearest springs in the world. There is a very nice trail to the headwaters of the spring. Apparently folks used to be able to swim in the springs, but NZ is combating an attack of a miserable foreign algae, so people are no longer allowed to touch the spring water for fear of contamination.
We then drove to the place in Pakawau where Miriam had made us reservations. The description of the place was hard to interpret; it could be anything from really wonderful to bloody awful. It was up a short, muddy road and didn’t seem very prepossessing.

No one was present but I found a phone with handwritten instructions to call. A happy voice answered. He said he and his wife were just sitting down to a spot of tea, that someone else had decided to stay an extra day, and then asked if we did we minded being upgraded to a cottage, and did we mind checking it out ourselves while he finished tea. All of that was fine with us. We had a choice of two cottages; one was partly attached to the main building, and the other was through a gate, past the large black chickens and at the edge of a grassy field. The partly attached one was nice, but the cottage out in the field was like home. Simple, comfortable, cozy and private.
We loved it. We booked three nights. Here’s the view out the sliding glass doors:
We then drove back to Collingwood, a small town on the Southeastern edge of Golden Bay, and checked in with the outfit providing our tour of Farewell Spit. By then it was raining on and off and there was a fair breeze blowing onshore.

The office for the tour company, which has been giving tours in the area for 60 years, was interesting. The original clockwork mechanism for the light in the Farewell Spit lighthouse was by the side of the door as we walked in, and there were pictures on the wall of giant squid, giant octopus, an oarfish, and whales that had been found stranded on Farewell Spit. In addition, the person we spoke to (who ended up being our guide) looked a lot like my partner, Mac.

We asked him about the weather and he checked the ‘net. He said there would likely be the odd shower if we did the tour the next day, when we had planned to do it, but that the forecast showed better weather the day after. He also said the forecast was highly unreliable.

Since it was cold and rainy, and Farewell Spit is a pretty desolate area under the best of conditions, and we really liked the place we were staying, we changed our reservation to the day after, went back to our nifty cottage, I made dinner, we had some wine and went to bed.

The next day started out rainy and mostly stayed that way. We loafed around the cottage, drove back to Collingwood for a late but yummy breakfast, walked around the shore of Golden Bay, and bought some chocolates from the local chocolatier. With the gray weather it was hard to understand why the bay was named Golden Bay. But we marveled at the tide flats. The tide here is huge and the slope into the sea quite shallow. That causes huge amounts of land to be exposed when the tide is out.
We came back to our cottage, I worked on the text and photos for the blog, and then we drove back into Takaka. Miriam did the laundry, I found a place where I could upload stuff to the blog, we went shopping for more groceries, came back to the cottage, made dinner, ate to much, and went to bed.

Kayaking the Abel Tasman Coast - Day 2

We woke reasonably early, but each of us thought the other was still asleep, so we didn’t move to avoid disturbing each other. That meant we were practically they last to get up. We had instant coffee (which tasted very good) and waited for space to open up at the breakfast table. We had cereal, toast, peanut butter and marmalade, and more coffee.

The other couple at the breakfast table with us were from England and in their 20s. They came over to NZ for an extended holiday, working long enough in each place to get enough money to go to the next. They had just spent about six months working in Christchurch in a Mexican restaurant. We enjoyed their company so much we lost track of time, and didn’t get off the Cat-a-rac and onto the beach until about 9:20 am.

By that time all the people and kayaks on the beach were gone. Our kayak, a large, plastic, heavy, two person kayak full of gear, was about 20 yards up from the beach and waist high in a rack. I was a bit apprehensive, but with Miriam’s help it was easy to pull it off the rack and skid it down to the water.

As we were getting into the kayak the nice young English couple arrived on the beach – they were last off the cat-a-rac. They were surprised we old folks were kayaking (we were the only people staying on the Cat-a-rac who were kayaking -everyone else was walking). We felt proud to have surprised them.

We got into our kayak and set out on our day of guideless, “freedom” kayaking. It was 9:35 am. We had gotten a bit of a late start, but not bad. We were scheduled to meet a water taxi at Onetahouti Beach at 3:30 pm, and Frazier had told us the trip should only take us about three and a half hours. The brochure says four hours in calm water for experienced kayakers with no stops.

We were at the South end of Anchorage Bay, and the bay itself was mostly one long, sandy beach, so we decided to kayak straight across the mouth of the bay and then start hugging the coastline and enjoying the scenery. That worked fine, but we had a bit more wind and chop than we were expecting.

The point at the Northern end of the bay was rocky, and waves were breaking both on the point and a bit offshore. I was sitting in the back and doing the steering, and decided we could go between the offshore rocks and the point. The gap was about 20 feet wide and the waves were rising and falling over a foot. We could see rocks under the water in the gap, but I was pretty sure they were deep enough to let us through. We paused just before the gap, I yelled to Miriam to paddle hard, and we surged through the gap easily.

It made us feel good to do that all by ourselves.

Then we looked ahead.

The kayak company provided us each with a large scale, brightly colored, laminated map of the area, only slightly smudged and blurred because of moisture. The map indicated that there were frequent beaches all along the coast. And Frazier had shown us the bright green signs with yellow lettering that were placed on each beach, identified the beach and gave directions to public toilets and such. There were lots of beaches, each with nice, barely pronounceable Maori names, shown on our map.

However, as we rounded the Northern point of Anchorage Bay we couldn’t see any beaches with nice green signs. Instead we saw 1 foot chop with a stronger onshore wind than we had felt the day before, blowing about 15 degrees to the starboard of our course. This meant it was blowing into each of the inlets and signless beaches we could see, giving us no sheltered water.
And this meant I wasn’t comfortable paddling us close to the rocky shore, because we would be constantly at risk of being blown onto the rocks. Seeing the rocky shore up close is, of course, the primary reason to kayak the Abel Tasman coast.

Traveling along the rocky coast takes a lot longer than traveling in a straight line between the rocky points at the end of the bays. Since there was no inland water that was sheltered from the wind we decided to take the shorter route and head for the next point, in hope of finding sheltered water beyond it.

We made it to the next point, only to find more unsheltered, small inlets with onshore winds and no nice green and yellow signs. So we paddled to the next point. We rounded it and found the same, and so paddled to the next point. By this time we had been paddling two and half hours without stopping, all into the wind and in a chop that was as high as our kayak. Miriam was getting quite wet and cold from the spray coming over the bow, but she didn’t want to pull into shore to change because the parts of the shore where we could beach the kayak were a long way out of our way and we were beginning to get concerned that we would not make it to our destination in time to be picked up by the water taxi.

I was trying to keep track of our progress, but I couldn’t be sure where we were because we couldn’t see any signs on the beaches (leading me to suspect we had not yet come to any of the beaches shown on the map), and because the map was too blurry to make out coastal details. I guessed that the next point would only be about a third of the way we needed to travel, and we had been paddling for more than two and a half hours.

We decided we would round that next point and go into shore no matter how it looked. We were tired, cold and we needed to eat.

The last point was the hardest. It was a blunt, rather than a sharp, point, which meant it took a long time to get around, and it was completely exposed. We paddled steadily and hard. We both watched the shore. We each noticed that it wasn’t really clear that we were making any forward progress at all. We each refrained from telling this to the other. I started paddling harder, using up the strength and energy reserves I had been saving. It made a little difference, but I wasn’t at all sure that I could keep it up. As nearly as I could tell from the map, the point we were rounding was only slightly more than a third of the distance we were supposed to travel.

We rounded that point and saw: a narrow inlet and another point. We didn’t want to go into the narrow inlet because it was a long, long way in, so we paddled on, into the wind, getting more and more tired. We finally rounded the last point and saw a long beach with a lot of kayaks on it. We paddled toward it. Miriam asked what time it was. I told her about one fifteen. She said that we would never make the taxi. I agreed. We were a fair way offshore and it seemed to take forever just to get to the beach. We were trying to make land before the other kayaks left so we could find out where we were; we also hoped that we would find a guide with a telephone, who could call our water taxi and change our pickup point.

We beached the kayak and struggled out. Our muscles were too tired, and our bodies too cold and hungry, to move well. We must have looked like we were 102 years old.

After we beached the kayak I staggered over to the group of people who were sitting on the beach next to their kayaks. A nice young Kiwi came over to me. I thrust our crummy, blurry map at him, and asked plaintively “What beach are we on?”

He said something I couldn’t understand. I was still have trouble understanding Kiwi when people say just a few words. I need to hear at least several words to get my translators working. I said “Excuse me, what beach did you say?” He repeated: “Onetahouti, mate. This is Onetahouti beach.” I poked my cold, sandy finger at our destination on the map and croaked “Are we here?” He grinned and said “That’s right mate.”
I hobbled back to Miriam with the good news. We had paddled all the way to Onetahouti in one windy, cold, choppy, tiring slog. We were there two full hours before out pickup time!

We got back in the kayak to go a few hundred yards to the pickup point on the beach. On our way the wind died, the clouds thinned, we felt warmer, and a seal actually surfaced and lazily rolled around about 30 yards from our kayak. When we got about 10 yards from the beach I finally saw one of those green and yellow signs. I hadn’t seen them before because they blend beautifully with the foliage at the edge of the beach.

We pulled in at the pickup point where we met the lovely German couple we had started out with. We were mightily gratified when they volunteered that they found the day’s paddle very difficult. They were much younger and more experienced than us. While we were paddling we all had seen some other people on a one day guided kayak and water taxi trip, headed the opposite direction from us, cruising effortlessly with the wind behind them, pulled along by a sail. The German couple agreed with us that it was really hard to see those bums sailing home while we were battling the wind and waves.

We ate lunch, lay down in the sand, took a nap, and waited for the water taxi. We actually got warm, although Miriam cheated, changed into a dry shirt and put on about three layers of clothing. We tried to figure out why we got lost, but decided maybe it was for the best. If we had known where we were we probably would have stopped at one of the beaches along the way. If we had stopped, it’s not clear we would have had the energy to get back in and keep paddling.
The water taxi picked us up right on schedule. It’s an all metal boat with a big engine and space for perhaps a dozen people. The skipper lashed our kayaks to the gunnels crossways at the back of the boat, and headed on his way. By this time there were larger whitecaps out where we had been paddling, and the boat bucked and kicked in the swells.

The water taxi took about half an hour to cover the distance we had taken two days to paddle in the kayak.

We drove back to the chalets, checked in, and drove down to the café at the entrance to Abel Tasman park for dinner. We had pesto quesadillas and a carafe of red house wine. It hit the spot. We then drove home and hit the

Kayaking the Abel Tasman Coast - Day 1

We got up, packed and drove to the place we had booked our two day kayak trip. Our guide was a lovely young woman named Frazier, and our group included a young English couple (the lady was a zoologist who had just finished working in Tanzania tracking migration patterns of large mammals and her fellow was a taciturn lad who said he would do architecture if he went back to work), and a young German husband and wife who didn’t mention what they did but were, quite simply, lovely to be around.

The tidal ebb and flow is about 12 feet at Marahau, so the kayaking companies have tractors to pull the trailers that carry the kayaks down to the water. It was low tide when we went out. The water’s edge was about 150 yards from the rock wall at the edge of the road.

After careful instruction we got in our kayaks, secured our spray skirts and began our sea kayaking experience. The weather was beautiful. A little windier than the day before, but still quite outstanding. We paddled along under Frazier’s guidance while she identified the birds and bushes we saw. We saw lots of oystercatchers, cormorants, a couple of gannets and several types of beautiful gulls. The gulls here look like the gulls at home, but somehow neater, tidier and more delicate. Some have red feet, legs, beaks and circles around their eyes. Others are twice their size, with black wings and backs.
It was fun to see from the shore the terrain we had seen on our walk, but our paddle went quite a bit further than our walk. We stuck close to the shore This kept us mostly sheltered from the wind which was blowing from the Southwest at about 10-15 knots. Frazier told us this was a light wind, and that the forecast for our next day was even better; 10 knots but with a variable direction.
We went around one headland called the “wild mile.” Frazier warned us about it because it is exposed to the winds blowing in from the Tasman sea, and can be difficult to kayak. We had only a bit of wind and a slight chop; I teased Frazier about Kiwis calling those conditions “difficult.” As the next day's events would prove, I should have kept my mouth shut.

We got into Anchorage Bay about 3 pm. We made two stops along the way, one for tea and one for lunch. We had arranged to stay on the “Cat-a-rac”, a motorized catamaran with two decks that has been converted into housing. We pulled out kayaks out of the water, carried them up to a rack, hung our spray skirts and spray jackets out to dry, and said goodbye to Frazier. We then caught the launch out to the Cat-a-rac.

We were the first to arrive. The Cat-a-rac is owned and run by a fellow named Chris. He’s a Kiwi in his 30s that Miriam acknowledges could have been in the cast of Baywatch. We made the booking blind, without asking questions. It turns out that the Cat-a-rac has at least two levels of accommodation. One level consists of bedrooms with doors, windows and double beds. We had not booked one of those. Instead we had bunks quite literally below decks. To get to where we slept we walked forward as far as we could go on the lowest deck, then grabbed a hefty wooden railing for support while we lowered ourselves down a hole onto a rusty metal ladder that descended into one of the hulls of the catamaran. Just above the ladder was a lovely brass sign that said “crew.” Our hull had six sleeping spots; four single bunks along the outside wall of the hull, and one double bunk at the end that ran crossways and was up above the others.
Since we were first we picked the double, spread our gear out on it, grabbed our bottle of wine, and headed topside.

We sipped wine from cups and watched the shore as people began to arrive. The first person we met was a single, athletic looking fellow from Germany. He was on holiday, but he works for a German fitness magazine, and does articles on travel destinations for fitness buffs. It turned out he had visited the Nike campus in Beaverton for one of his assignments.

Next was a doctor and lawyer couple from Texas. The doc was a gastroenterologist who had owned his own practice and retired. His wife went to law school after their kids were out of the house and taught in a law school afterward. He was in NZ on a six month stint in a teaching hospital. They were both bright, articulate and very good at making conversation.

They were walking a portion of the Abel Tasman trail with a guide. It had not occurred to me that one could, or should, hire a guide to walk a trail, but they were wildly enthusiastic about their guide, who also was staying on the Cat-a-rac.

We talked to him for a while. He knows a lot about the area, but was born in Scotland. He makes his living doing guided walks out of Takaka (he pronounced it “Tar-kaka”), and was quite charming. We took his number and brochure, and thought we might use him for a one day trip into the Cobb Valley.

Chris fired up the barbecue and cooked venison burgers, sausages and a tasty corn casserole. We ate it happily and finished the bottle of wine.

Afterwards Miriam talked to the doctor and I talked with a couple from Belgium. He was a retired teacher from Belgium. She was an administrator for the foster child care system in one province of Belgium. It turns out, not surprisingly, that foster care in Belgium has the same major problem as in the U.S.: not enough qualified, willing parents. They were taking a five day holiday together in NZ; she was then going back to work, and he was spending another couple of weeks doing a bicycle tour of a portion of the South island.

We climbed down into our hull-hole relatively early that evening. Getting into our bunk took coordination. There was only about two feet of headroom (you could not sit upright) and you had to climb up a lower bunk to get in. Miriam wanted the outside, so I got in first. When we both were in we bonked our heads on the ceiling arranging the covers and drifted off to sleep.

At out age we do not sleep the entire night through without visiting the comfort station. In this case I could only reach the comfort station by sitting up, bonking my head again on the ceiling, clambering over my sleeping wife quietly in the dark so as not to wake the other person who was sharing that hull with us, clambering down onto the floor, pulling on my shoes so as not to hurt my feet on the rusty ladder, clambering up the ladder, and then out along the deck to the comfort station. The return trip required everything to be done in reverse. It was dark on the deck and pitch black in the hull-hole, so when I started to go down I mistook where in the hole the ladder was and almost slipped down. In short, the trip to the john was a memorable experience. So memorable, in fact, that Miriam, having tried it once, decided she would rather die of thirst than do it again just for a bit of water.

But here’s the interesting thing. It really was a lot more fun to sleep down a hull hole in the deck than it would have been to sleep in an ordinary, comfortable bedroom.

Marahau Day 2

We had planned to get up, walk into the park early, and photograph the sunrise. I set the alarm for 6:00, but luckily sun had already started to rise by then. We admired it briefly through the bedroom window and slept for another hour or two. When I finally got up I shaved for the second time since we left home, but only my neck.

We ate breakfast and dithered about where to stay and what to do. My wife is an expert ditherer, and her performance this day exceeded even my expectations. She ended up rebooking our kayak trip out of Marahau to include an overnight, and changed our eco-tour out of Golden Bay (our next stop after Marahau) to a different option. Both were good changes, but the phone in our chalet only works erratically and Miriam has to use a calling card that requires the entry of lots of numbers, so the rebooking attempts took a lot of time and generated a lot of wifely adrenaline.

We drove about 20 minutes on a very narrow, windy road to the neighboring town of Kaiteriteri for lunch, and had another delicious fish chowder in a restaurant overlooking an exceptionally lovely bay.
We picked up balsamic vinegar, drove back, and decided to spend the rest of the day relaxing. Marahau was the first place we visited in NZ where the weather was actually warm. And the sky was blue, and the view out of our chalet was gorgeous. We read, Miriam fiddled more with the phone and our Golden Bay reservations, I plunked dobro and we even took a nap.

For dinner I sliced the tomatoes, crumbled the feta, and marinated them in the balsamic vinegar. Really good ingredients make a really good meal. Miriam sipped an NZ sauvignon blanc and I an NZ Merlot Cabernet.

Miriam had another wrassling match with the phone and finally got through to Golden Bay, where she shortened our reservation to give us more freedom to dither about arrangements after we arrive there.

A bit later we each had massive bowls of hokey pokey ice cream (we were leaving the next morning at it would have been a sin to waste it), finished the wine, packed our bags for our kayak trip, and went to bed.

Marahau Day 1

We checked out of our motel in Nelson and drove to Motueka, stopped for lunch, had a tasty fish chowder and garlic bread, and then drove on to Marahau.

Marahau is a very small town at the North Eastern edge of Abel Tasman national park. The park itself is in the far North of the Southern island. We booked two nights at a beautiful, self-contained “chalet” of cypress wood (kind of like a Lindal cedar cabin back home) sitting up on a hill about 400 meters from the entrance to the park. Both our living area and bedroom had great views overlooking farmland and the bay.

We checked in, drove back to Motueka to get groceries (there is no market in Marahau), and bought fresh monkfish, kumara, fruit, wine, fresh tomatoes, NZ feta cheese, ground coffee for the French press in the chalet (it’s called “plunger grind over here), muesli, hokey-pokey ice cream (a NZ standard consisting of vanilla ice cream with toffee pieces) and such. I crumbed and fried the fish and boiled the kumara (a bit too much) and we made a huge meal.
We then drove down the hill to the park entrance and walked onto the Abel Tasman trail.
The tide was out and the bay had long, rough sandy, rocky and muddy flats going out a substantial distance to the water. The trail itself is cut into the hillside, and the vegetation is so dense we could only occasionally see the water except at the lookouts and beach stops.
We went out on one beach that had a shapely granite tower with a small tree at the top. We took lots of pictures. We are told that the granite here is soft; “partly baked” was the way one person described it. That’s why it weathers into such interesting shapes.
By the time we turned around the sun was setting and we could see beautiful colors above the trees. Miriam rounded a corner and found two large quail. The female puffed up and hunkered down in the trail dust, then got up and followed the male. The walked about 20 feet ahead of us, staying on the trail, just like they were touring the park, walking along the trail in front of us.
We got home after sunset, had a glass of wine and turned in.

Wellington

We spent three nights in Wellington; this gave us two whole days to see the city with no traveling. We spent the first day wandering around getting our bearings and shopping for cold weather and outdoor gear that we hadn’t brought with us. We both got long johns and I got some water sandals. Whoop ti do.

Our hotel was just a block away from Cuba Street. Cuba street is a narrow street, mostly closed off from vehicle traffic, that has a lot of older brick and stone buildings with restaurants and little shops.

We ate twice at Tulsi, which serves nouvelle cuisine, East Indian style. We ate there the first time because it was one of the few things open, and the second time because the first time was good.

The second day, Sunday, we spent mostly at Te Papa, the national museum of NZ. We were there from about 10:30 am until 2:00 pm looking at the natural history and Maori culture exhibits, went out to finish our shopping, and came back for another hour or so to see the post-European-contact art collection.

We are finding that traveling is a great opportunity for us to learn about ourselves. Cities, for us, are merely “nice” and not “great.” It’s beginning to look like we can’t get to great unless we are out in bush/outback/country/mountains without crowds of people around us. We didn’t take a single picture in Wellington until we were leaving and waiting for the ferry.

And we are very glad we did Te Papa, but, frankly, we have already seen the Maori meeting house at the Waitangi treaty center, and a slew of Maori artifacts already, so going to Te Papa didn’t blow us away the way it might have if we hadn’t already seen and done what we have seen and done.

Te Papa made me think about the differences I saw between the Australian Aboriginals and the Maori. In some ways there are great similarities with Native Americans; all three cultures suffered dramatically from European settlement and subsequent expansion (wars, disease, and discrimination), and lost most of their valuable land. All three cultures are striving to regain lost pride and wealth.

But the Aboriginal people came to Australia perhaps 50,000 years ago, and lived there without much change (as far as anyone could tell) for most of that time. They were hunter-gatherers who had to roam from place to place to find enough food, and they existed in small groups that made decision mostly by consensus, and that warred relatively infrequently among themselves. This was probably because they had to work too hard to feed themselves in a very hostile environment that was full of animals that would happily kill them. They didn’t have domestic animals, agriculture (most of the land was not suited for it), buildings or other permanent structures, no trees big enough for canoes or other boats, and no common language. Yet they lived successfully in a hostile environment for a vast amount of time; archeologists estimate from excavated skeletons that the average longevity of an Aboriginal before European contact was about 40 years.

The Maori, on the other hand, only came to NZ within the last 1000 years; they brought with them a complex Neolithic culture called “competitive tribalism,” domestic animals and domesticated plants. They lived in a bountiful land with huge trees, cultivatable soil, and fish and other animals that could be eaten.

The Maori developed a kind of art and music that is easy for us to understand. They also spent a lot of time fighting with each other for territory and status. Defeated Maori warriors and their families were made slaves by the victorious Maori, if they were not killed. Although the Maori lived in a much more hospitable place than the Aborigines, archeologists estimate from excavated skeletons that the average longevity of a Maori before European contact was about 30 years.

We caught the ferry from Wellington to Picton Monday morning. We waited in a queue of cars for about an hour to get on the ferry, and watched locals successfully fishing.
The ferry is huge, and carries passengers, cars and large trucks. The crossing takes about three hours and the travel guides all mention sea-sickness as a possibility. We had a calm crossing.

Picton is quite pretty, but we are getting a bit jaded. We drove on to Nelson, the major town nearest Abel Tasman National Park and Golden Bay, found a nice unit, had a good dinner at the Stingray Café, I blogged and practiced dobro, and Miriam read travel books and plotted our next move.

Rotorua to Wellington

We got up, packed and checked out. We weren’t sure which route to Wellington would be best. One goes inland for a while, then goes down near the Western shore. The other is longer, may not be as big a road, and goes to the East coast at Napier and then back inland. Paul, our host in Rotorua, strongly recommended the route through Napier so we chose it.

We drove to Taupo for breakfast. Taupo is on Lake Taupo, and we could see beautiful, snow-capped mountains across the huge lake. The wind off the lake was very cold.

South of Taupo we took a cutoff that was simply marked “Scenic overlook.” It went a surprising way off the road and dead-ended above a lovely waterfall out in the middle of nowhere.

We drove on to Napier. Napier shows up as a nifty place in the guidebooks because it is on a bay facing the Pacific Ocean, and because it was destroyed by an earthquake in the 1930s and rebuilt all at once in Art Deco style. We walked along the bayfront, which has a nicely tended park.

Napier is a tourist town, and every Art Deco façade covers some sort of tourist peddling activity. I did talk to a very nice man in a craft co-op who turns beautiful wooden bowls and sells them at reasonable prices. Since I have done a bit of turning we talked technique and tools; I think he appreciated talking to someone who understood a bit of his craft. Also lunch was good. But that was about it for us and Napier. 1930’s Art Deco city buildings hold our attention for maybe 20 minutes on a good day. But some folks really crave its ice cream.
We left Napier and drove to Auckland, stopping for a flat white in Carterton, a small town that somehow has a nifty, atmospheric wine bar with a hammered copper espresso machine. Since it was the only place in town that was open at that time (we walked by three cafes, all closed, before we found this one), we were particularly grateful the coffee was delicious.

And then on to Wellington. To get to Wellington from Upper Hutt we had to drive about 20 K of very sharply curved, windy road that is cut into the mountains between Wellington and the East coast. The cut was almost vertical, the shoulder was no more than a foot wide, and the other side of the road was a sheer drop off. The road switched back and forth, sometimes almost doubling over on itself. It was really fun to drive, and would have been particularly excellent on a motorcycle.

We found our way to our hotel without trouble. Again Miriam picked a good one. No view, but the weather is crummy so that doesn’t matter. It has a big living area, a separate bedroom, is quite clean, airy and reasonably priced, and is located just a block from good restaurants and shopping.

We ate at an Indian restaurant that got high ratings in the Lonely Planet; the food was delicious. We watched a bit of TV and crashed.

In Rotorua

Rotorua is noted for its volcanic activity. The city has a large lake and lots of tourists; it has oodles of fee-to-see-it Maori cultural experiences, and one can also zorb, bungy jump, mountain bike and do other vigorous things.

With these possibilities to inspire us, we got up and walked into town to eat. We found an organic restaurant called “NBs.” It was their first morning open and we got super attention and delicious food. I had French toast, which bore little resemblance to what I had experienced under that label before. It included fried, caramelized banana, and was yummy.

We walked back to our motel and drove up into the hills to partake of one of the nearby volcanic and Maori cultural experiences. Our map showed a large area that was marked both “Whakarewarewa” and “Te Puia.” We turned into Whakarewarewa since it came first. Whakarewarewa turned out to be a small Maori village located among the hot springs. The area was used by Maori before European contact, and has been continuously occupied since at least 1904, when a tiny Catholic church was built there.

The Maori in this place now live in small European style houses, but we saw an example of the kinds of houses that the Maori used to use in this area. They were very small, low roofed, and built from the trunks of tree ferns. Our guide said that the tree fern trunks have insulating properties, and that several people survived in them for ten days when they were buried in ash and mud after an eruption late last century.

Most of the village cooking is done by putting food into steam vents, or by lowering it into the hot water pools. It's supposed to be tasty, but doesn't always sit well with everyone.

There are a number of pools with different temperatures that the residents use for different purposes. The community also has built rectangular cement bath tubs; water is diverted into them from one of the hot natural pools and allowed to cool to tolerable levels in time for evening baths.

We saw a delightful show with traditional dances and singing. The leader was a short, attractive Maori woman of indeterminate age who spoke quite articulately with what seemed, to my ear, to be an English storekeeper’s accent. The others in the troupe were interesting, but she was a delight; full of energy and personality, with a good voice and good dancing and poi skills.
Most of the audience was children from a nearby city. At the end of the normal performance they all got on stage and sang and danced a Maori song. It was really fun to watch. Kids singing are fun anyway, but it was especially neat, in view of the demonstration we saw later and the tension between Maori and Pakeha that is evident in the news, to see this large, diverse group of Maori and Pakeha kids, happily singing and dancing a Maori song, with the professional performers tapping their feet and singing along quietly.

According to our guide all the people in the community act like family, and refer to each other as aunties, uncles and cousins. They apparently make their livings on tourism. Besides participating in the show, people in the community carve, make clothing and souvenirs, do tattoos, or operate shops for tourists.

We also saw the old cemetery next to the Catholic church. Because hot water or hot mud lie just a few feet underground bodies were buried in cement sepulchers above ground.
Off at one end there is a geyser that erupts frequently. Our guide pointed out people sitting on benches on the opposite side of the geyser. She said they were at Te Puia, the rival tourist stop that costs twice as much, and that owns the land on the other side of the geyser.

We passed Te Puia on our way out. It has a gigantic parking lot, fancy modern buildings and elaborate pathways, but no village. We felt pleased that we had accidentally picked the one we did.

We drove further South to another volcanic tourist attraction. On the way in we stopped at a free mud pit and watched it belch grey mud. When we got to the not-free tourist attraction we decided that one grey, belching mud pit is probably pretty much like another and drove back to Rotorua for late lunch.
We had trouble finding a spot because the restaurants close at 2 or 2:30 pm and don’t reopen until dinner. We did eventually find one, but not until we wandered quite a few blocks. Our wandering took us by a Maori political demonstration. Apparently the NZ police targeted some Maori for an anti-terrorist raid and many people (certainly including the demonstrators) are concerned that the raids were racially motivated.

After lunch we drove back to our motel, tried the motel’s spa (nice and warm), and talked about where to go next. I went out for groceries (NZ cheese and crackers, avocado, “tiger sticks” (small, flavorful loaves of bread) and a pineapple). Miriam did laundry and found us a place to stay in Wellington. We watched the Maori TV channel and an Auzzie outback serial called McLeod’s Daughters and crashed.

Raglan to Rotorua – The Waitomo Caves

We awoke to good weather. We took a short walk along the edge of the bay, pronounced Raglan insufficiently spectacular to consume a whole day when the weather was good, and decided to drive on to see the Waitomo caves.

The drive to the Waitomo caves took about two hours, all through lovely pastoral scenery, and all on windy, two lane roads.

We couldn’t make up our minds from the guidebooks which cave tours to do, so we went into the “i site.” Most NZ towns have a government sponsored information center with brochures, books and helpful people who know a lot about the area, but are not allowed to make recommendations.
We selected the 45 minute glowworm cave tour (the basic, everybody-does-it, tour) and a two hour walk through Ruakuri cave.

The standard 45 minute tour was fine. We saw limestone stalactites and stalagmites, and rode in a boat with a dozen other folk in the darkness under the glowworms. The guide pulls the boat slowly through the cave using ropes. The glowworms do look like stars in the night sky.

The Ruakuri walk was much better. First, there were only five of us on the tour, so we could take our time and ask questions; second, the guide reminded us a bit of our younger son who worked for a while as a whitewater rafting guide, and third, we could take pictures (which is not allowed on the basic tour).

The company that runs the Ruakuri walk apparently spent about $4.5 million on the walkways and paths. The tour begins by walking down on metal walkways that switch back and forth, descending us by about 60 feet into the earth. We walked through cracks in the limestone, along a subterranean river, saw “tomo” (deep holes in the limestone that sometimes run from the surface to the bottom-most caves), and actually got to see a glowworm up close as it began eating a fly.

As the guide said, glowworms look a lot better with the lights out. With the lights out they are small points of coldfire blue light. With the lights on they look like horizontal strands of brown snot, with delicate strands of clear mucous hanging down.
Glowworms live in caves above underground streams and rivers. Flies and other insects that feed on things in the water are attracted by the blue lights in the dark, and are ensnared in the mucous strands. When that happens the glowworm hauls up the mucous strands, bites the head off the ensnared insect, injects something to dissolve the hapless victim’s innards, and sucks the resulting muck out.

Glowworms are the larval form of a fly, and live in worm form for about nine months. When they turn into flies they live for only four days, and, since they are born in caves, are often caught and eaten by other glowworms. It doesn’t seem to be an enviable life.

NZ had large flightless birds called “moa;” they were extinct at the time of European contact. The largest stood about nine feet tall. The guide said that many moa skeletons were found in the caves at the bottoms of the tomos. The moa apparently would be walking along, not watching where they put their feet, and step into a tomo and fall down to their deaths.

We left Waitomo and drove to Rotorua, an area noted for its volcanic activity and for opportunities to see presentations on Maori culture. The drive took a couple of hours. We stopped at a town called Te Awamutu at about 4:00 pm. Most of the restaurants were closed (too late for lunch, too early for dinner) but we found a small place that served roasted meats. We had chicken and kumara, and thus fortified, drove the rest of the way to Rotorua. We found a nice motel with a spa pool; our unit had a kitchen, living area, bathroom and separate bedroom. After our nights in backpackers and on the sailboat, the space seems extravagantly excessive, but nice. The operator even presented us with a free bottle of NZ chardonnay, as well as a pint bottle of milk. Presentation of a bottle of milk seems to be customary at some NZ motels.

Omapere to Raglan – the Kauri Museum and the Gum Fields

We left Omapere and drove down the West coast. We didn’t stop to revist the Kauri forest because our night views had been really special and we didn’t want to spoil them.

We had breakfast at a small town called Pirongia. Next door was a butchery that illustrated one of the things I enjoy about travelling in Australia and New Zealand. Folks and signs say things you understand, but in a slightly different way than they would at home.
We did stop at the Kauri museum about an hour South of Omapere. It is quite large, and has exhibits of old furniture made of Kauri wood, huge slabs of Kauri wood, an extensive collection of Kauri gum, lots of Kauri logging equipment, and dioramas of life during the time Kauri was logged and the gum fields were in operation.

The sap of the Kauri tree is clear and golden brown. Once it is out of the tree it hardens into a lightweight, solid material that resembles amber. The Mauri used Kauri gum to make torches and lights, to make a form of chewing gum, and they used the ash as the dye in their distinctive tattoos. Europeans used it for varnish, for linoleum, and for carving.

The gum was very durable, and it could be recovered by digging into the remains of ancient Kauri forests that had long disappeared.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s there was a good market in Europe for Kauri gum, and many New Zealanders worked in the gum fields, digging up buried Kauri gum.

The exhibits in the Kauri museum made it clear that this was a very, very difficult way to make a living. The diggers (almost all Pakeha (non-Mauri) from the pictures and exhibits) would poke long iron rods into the wet ground and identify potential lumps of gum by the feel against the rod. They would then dig down in the rocky, wet soil as much as thirty feet in some places, and pull out the gum. The gum was in lumps ranging from a few inches in diameter to hunks about 3 or 4 feet long and a foot to two feet wide. The diggers would then wash the dirt off the gum, take it back to their shacks, spend the evening using knives to remove gravel and dirt from the gum, put their clothes to dry over the fire, collapse, wake up, and do it all over again. About once a week a buyer would ride by and buy the bagged, graded gum. There were several pictures of old men who spent their lives working in the gum fields, and who lived and died in small corrugated iron shacks after they were too old to dig. There also was a picture of a 93 year old man digging gum. He worked all his life in the gum fields, and was still working at 93.

After the museum we drove to Raglan, a pretty little town on a bay in the Tasman Sea. We found a backpackers recommended by the Lonely Planet and got a room. The rooms all surrounded a central courtyard with grass. The other people at the backpackers were all at least 25 years (and maybe more) younger than us, and mostly surfers. We do, however, bump into the young German lady who is studying to be a travel agent. We feel like old friends.
The rooms at this backpackers are quite small. There was not much room on either side of the double bed, and there was about four feet between the foot of the bed and the French doors that ran the width of the room and opened into the courtyard. With our mountain of luggage we barely fit. But the room was clean and neat, and had a window over the head of the bed that looked out onto the bay and allowed a sea breeze in.

This backpackers has its bathrooms were in one corner of the courtyard, and has separate bathrooms for separate sexes – a more complex arrangement than at Cap’n Bob’s. It also has surfboards, kayaks and a small sailing pram available for guests. It sits right on the edge of the picturesque bay, and has limestone formations across the bay that apparently make an interesting kayaking destination.

It was grey and cold when we arrived, so we were not tempted to do anything wet that evening. We had a good dinner at the only place that was open, and planned to stay the next night to check Raglan out.