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.