Miners and Splunkers Delight

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Old mining sites and lots of caves! We hung around Karamea for two days and checked out the trails. We got poured on one day while investigating some really neat caves. One was a tunnel you had to travel 100 meters through to continue on the trail! We also went further to check out an old gold mining site (where incidentally it started to pour) and found ourselves huddling in a recreated miners hut with a weka (wingless bird) stalking us for cracker bits. We slept at the start a beautiful DOC camp.

The second day we pushed the limits of our gas tank and went up a 14 mile old logging road to see some arches and more caves. The arches were quite impressive. One was 30 meters tall and a couple hundred meters long. It looked like a huge train tunnel. We also saw the egg sacs of the ancestors of prehistoric spiders. Kind of creepy really. We threw the car into neutral and coasted down to a gas station just in the nick of time.

Headed towards Westport.

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