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.