The Longest Drive (As Opposed to The Longest Day,one of the greatest movies of all time) Takaka to Karamea

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Now that we were preparing to move on from Takaka the sun was coming out in full force!

This morning was the earliest we had arisen for several days but we knew we had a good distance to cover to our next destination at Karamea.

With a full tank of petrol we headed along the fertile Takaka Valley to East Takaka which is sited at the foot of the hill road and then started the steady rise to the top of the hill and at 791 metres above sea level the road features in the website ‘Dangerous Roads ‘although it doesn’t seem to have any other warnings except that there are 257 corners to negotiate with some hairpins being almost 320 degrees.

It didn’t bother us and the only regret we had having tackled the road twice both into and out of Golden Bay was the disappointment that there wasn’t a lookout at the top where you could stop and take in the views either to Golden Bay or Nelson.

Down the other side and the GPS started to take us on roads past apple orchards, some with their fruit picked and others waiting their turn.

Then the crop seemed to change to hops although the crop was well gone and the great acres of structures and netting were bare for the time being.

The road was heading along the Motueka Valley with the Motueka River flowing close by and we were making good progress time wise.

Tapawera is a typical small Kiwi rural community that is repeated all around the countryside away from the main cities and is the lifeblood of the farmers, farm workers and those who serve the communities with their trades.

And this morning Tapawera was looking busy in a rural sense with people coming and going doing their business.

At Kohatu Junction we joined back in with SH6 and quickly caught up to a logging truck with a full load just before the Hope Saddle giving us time to overtake and get over the hill at our cruising speed rather than crawling behind it.

We did have thoughts of turning off at Glenhope to try and find the Glenhope Railway Station on the now defunct Nelson to Gowanbridge rail line as the station is supposedly still intact from when the line closed in 1954 when the Government of the day abandoned the idea of the line joining up with the line from the West Coast.However,some of the information I had read about the station may have been out of date and we may have ended up wandering the district only to find the station wasn’t as pristine as we might have thought.

We passed the turnoff to St Arnaud and Tophouse so had effectively completed the circuit and now we had Murchison in our sights as we started to feel a bit hungry and ready for something to eat and drink.

Murchison had been the centre of a major 7.3 earthquake in 1929 but unlike the nearby settlement of Inangahua where a major quake had struck in 1968, Murchison as a settlement had survived and continued on despite heavy damage to houses and other structures.

We have been through the town on numerous occasions over our years of holidays in the South Island but had never stopped to take in the historical place on foot.

So after coffee and two huge savoury muffins in a café, that looked like it might have been a service station in a previous life. The canopy which would have been over the petrol pumps provided an expansive outdoor seating area and now that we were back amongst more people, we came back down to earth reminded that COVID will be around us somewhere.

A short walk along the main street reading the plaques that told some of the early history of the small town which was first named Hampden but had that name changed a few later so as not to confuse it with a town of the same name in Otago.

The town was laid out in 1865 shortly after the discovery of gold in 1863.Most of the houses were built of wood from the surrounding forests which was probably a good thing as those houses to a great degree survived the 1929 earthquake much better than those constructed of brick or concrete.

With our curiosity of Murchison satisfied we were on the road again and entered the Upper Buller Gorge for a short distance before the name changes to Lower Buller Gorge and heads in a more direct westerly line towards Westport which we arrived at shortly after exiting the gorge.

We did a bit of shopping at New World and filled up the Corolla with petrol as we expect that that commodity will be more expensive in Karamea where there is unlikely to be any brand com it has to be hauled 100 kilometres with no other petrol stations on the way.

As we left Westport in brilliant sunshine and no wind we were reminded of our last visit to the area 18 months ago when we were in the middle of a ‘weather bomb ‘that hammered the area from the Tasman Sea which will live in the memory of #2 grandson, Cameron, for the rest of his life, such was the strength of the wind at a number of places we visited.

But today was totally opposite and the drive up the coast with the calm ocean to the left and towering forest covered hills and then mountains to the right as we passed through locations such as Fairdown and Waimangaroa as well as the tri town of Ngakawau/Granity/Hector (all 3 just seemed to run into each other with no separation of farms etc.

At Mohikinui the road turns inland and soon we are climbing the winding and hilly road that will take us over the last physical impediment of hills and down to Karamea where we have another three nights of accommodation at a motel down by the bank of the Karamea River.

We had a store bought dinner and then prepared to watch what we expected could be a spectacular sunset into the ocean only to see the sun disappear quickly into a small bank of cloud offshore negating what we had hoped for ,a sun sinking into the ocean.Oh well, perhaps tomorrow might be different.

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