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Published: March 21st 2010
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Nath enjoying his cake break in the rainFeeding eels and a salmon named Fred.
On the way back to Takaka we stopped and picked up our first hitch hikers as they didn’t seem too weird (6 minute abs!!!), they were both girls and one a chatty Swedish girl and the other a quiet (for a change) American girl. After dropping them off at some random guy’s house (who they’d never met but someone had recommended they stay with) we found our spot on the freedom camp, which was under a bridge and started cooking our dinner. Feeling a bit like the troll from “The three Billy goats gruff” in our camping spot we enjoyed an evening of “people watching”, all of which were new age hippies and youngsters trying to suck petrol out of their cars tanks (without success but plenty of coughing and spluttering). We seem to do a lot of people watching, its actually quite fun considering the amount of weird, sorry “interesting and colourful” people you meet when touring round in a campervan. Luckily by the time they were rain dancing naked round the trees and playing the bongos we were busy watching another instalment of Lord of the rings (which Adam had kindly
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New Zealand summer time goes on given us) with our earphones in!
Next day we woke up to a Noah type flood, as the rain hadn’t stopped all night, and headed into Takaka. We had been told it was a laid back “hippie” kind of town but we had figured this was a turn of phrase not a description. Indeed it was like a small portion of the 60’s had been left behind, with the street full of multicoloured clothes shops, organic markets, and well stores selling candles and reiki massage etc. It would also seem that the government had declared it a “no mirror” town as most people either dressed with their eyes shut or were colour blind (maybe I’m missing the hippie point but your able to look good and still wash your clothes surely!). Feeling the hippie smell a little closer to home than we wanted, we headed to a paid campsite for a shower. Nice little place, obviously someone’s back garden with a few power points but it did the job. I had kept seeing in adverts that some camp sites had ensuite showers and I had wondered what they meant. Turns out, this site had them, they generally mean purpose
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Special cake for special m built individual showers in a wet room style portacabin. This is great normally as you feel you can take your time and not worry too much about shaving or not flushing straight away (!) but they don’t let the steam out. So after your shower you find that your dabbing yourself dry and nothing is really happening, it was like trying to dry yourself in a sauna.
The rain lasted pretty much all day but in the late afternoon, it was like a whole other season as the sun shone brightly and we decided we’d make the most of it and venture out. We headed for a local spring that was known as the biggest fresh water spring in New Zealand. As usual the water was see-through, absolutely clear and so asking to be swum in (but you weren’t allowed). I don’t really know how else to describe it other than its like having a huge fish tank that your looking into. I was covered head to toe at this point in sandfly spray, being by water now makes me a bit nervous, so even if you could swim in it, I would have had to stay away (I
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Proof that I do try and blog as often as possible don’t want to ruin the environment anymore by putting my nasty chemical covered skin in it - flying around the world causing fumes and destroying the ozone is damage enough for me). From here we decide that we must be by the local beach so that was worth seeing whilst it was a beautiful evening. However without a map we struggled to find anything so eventually gave up knowing that we would be by lots of beaches the following day when we headed to Abel Tasman.
Around tea time we were visited by the local puss cat that I like to call Larry (as he was happy as Larry with a cuddle and would purr and dribble the whole time), he stayed for tea, we discussed local politics and then said our farewells. Nath and I then decided we would see what the hippie nightlife would hold in store for us……nothing; the town was dead apart form one bar playing “alternative bongo music” and another huge pub/hostel that was empty. Being the prudish Brit I am we went for the pub and enjoyed a few bevies whilst watching some music channel and reading (well me really) a pile of
girly mags. Well with all the excitement over it was off to bed and when we got to the camp site we suddenly realised the sky was lit up by the Milky Way. We had seen it before but never had it been so clear, which is weird being that we were in a town. We stood for a while just watching in awe when Nath suddenly jumped out of his skin and let out a little girly scream. He had felt something furry brush up against his leg, which turned out to be Larry welcoming us back home.
The next day we had decided to actually get some site seeing done now the weather was better and successfully managed to tick all of the “things to do” boxes in my visitors leaflet. The first of which was salmon fishing at a local salmon farm, where they didn’t charge you a thing unless you caught a fish. Sounded like a bargain, free equipment, stay as long as you like and just try not to catch anything too big as the price per kilo escapes me but was not cheap. When the lady behind the counter asked if Nath wanted
a left or right handed rod, I laughed and asked if she was joking, turns out no she wasn’t and apparently I had been the first person that had ever said that (cant quite believe it). So with rod in hand and his bucket with killing stick in it (yes a nasty metal spike that you drive into the fishes’ brain!!!) We went off to choose our spot on the lake area. We were sharing our spot with a rather hot looking sheep that was shading himself behind a picnic bench (not that we saw him till he said hello). I wasn’t going to be involved with the fishing and killing of the fish so left Nath to it (I’m happy to eat the meat whilst we’re away if anything I’m finding it easy but I still have my morals and whilst passively assigning death to something by picking it in the supermarket is one thing, actually killing the fish itself is another!). I had brought the lap top with me to get some bloggin done as Nath was bound to be ages, but within 10 mins he had caught something.
A huge 1.88kg fish was attached to his
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Water so clear it looked like a fish tank rod, flipping about and trying to get away. I felt bad but was filming at the time and trying to hep by passing the landing net so tried not to think about it. Within minutes Nath had done the dirty deed and killed our fish (or so we thought, it took two attempts and even then we are not sure cos he kept moving a little) and we headed to the shop where they would cook him in whatever way you wanted. We took our catch to the girl at the counter sure he would break some kind of record (only to find we were well behind, the biggest that season was somewhere near 4kg!!), and we chose how we would have him smoked and also named him. Well I say named him, when the girl asked for a name, I thought she meant a name for the fish so I said “Fred”, but she want our name so they could call us once the fish had been smoked, Nath explained the confusing whilst I stepped away (doh!) and the girl laughed “that’s makes two firsts for today” I then sat outside and continued the blog waiting for Fred to
be gutted and smoked whilst Nath, ever interested watched and filmed the whole process.
I must admit he was very very tasty and we did thank him for letting us catch him and eat him (which I’m sure he appreciated on some level). But being so big we only had half of him smoked and had the rest bagged up to take away. With all the blood and guts over I needed something a little more sweet and endearing, so we went next door to the second of our “must do things to do in Takaka” the eel feeding farm. This was basically a little petting zoo, with farm animals loose around the place and each visitor given a bag of oats so they could be mugged by the sheep and chickens as they entered. We spent ages walking around this place, with me making sure that each animal got their fare share of the oats and a quick cuddle, (for those that didn’t bite anyway). Nath followed me around with the camera, knowing full well this was much more my kind of thing. The lady that owned the place had said she met so many travellers that miss
their pets and their animal contact that she figured this was a good idea, and I agreed, even though there were no kittens and puppies I was still well pleased.
After meeting all the animals, who each had names (sorry cant remember them now) including scary emu/pink windmill styley birds, a biting pig and a weird cow type creature that turned out to be a Yak!!, we headed to feed the legendary eels. Turns out back at the turn of the century the lady that owned the farm used to throw the left over crumbs from lunch into the river and inadvertently encouraged the eels to come and fee at that area. From this she opened up eel feedings to the public and it had been going ever since, with some of the eels possibly still alive from those initial feedings! (apparently eels can live for donkey’s years, or should that be eel’s years?) We were given a pot of mince meat and a stick to feed them with and headed down to the waters edge…..and there they were. They weren’t hard to find, they were all waiting, almost piling up on top of each other waiting for people
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Whoops Nath forgets to zoom out again to come feed them. It was a weird outing I must say, but I did enjoy giving them all a little bit of meat on a stick whilst trying to coax them to come further out. Nath was particularly hard on them making them practically jump out to get to his food offerings (which some of them did). It turns out that eel feeding is number 47 of the AA’s 101 things kiwis must do (a list I have seen on many websites and quoted in many leaflets) - wow I wonder what number one is - pig polishing???? (No, turns out its actually going to Milford Sound).
With the feeding frenzy over, Nath and I headed back to the café to have a cuppa and a cake, and then a round of golf (the crazy variety) before heading back to Elton for our evening trip down to Abel Tasman. A long windy drive as we’ve come to expect from NZ that took us to a place called Kaiteriteri (apparently you don’t really pronounced the last “Teri”) where we were going to be doing some kayaking the next day.
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