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Published: February 5th 2010
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Buller Gorge
Me on the swingbridge We got up this morning, and while our bodies feel sore, I think the aching, burning, pain is a little bit less. We drove to Buller Gorge, where we went across New Zealand’s longest swing bridge (110m). It was incredibly scary for me. It wobbled back and forth and you could feel it bounce with every step. It went over a really pretty river though. I felt a little bit like Indiana Jones at the end of The Temple of Doom, when he crosses the rickety old bridge. I felt very brave having crossed it. We did a short loop walk around the island, stopping off to look at the river and climb on some rocks. At a lot of these rivers/beaches that have rocks all around them, people pile them up in little stacks. It's kind of cool looking to see all the stacks placed around. The loop took us past a fault line where it catalogued a bunch of huge earthquakes New Zealand has had in the past 100 years or so. It's impressive how many large earthquakes had happened in that period of time. It seemed far more scary than living in California! From the time-line it looks
Buller Gorge
Safely on the other side of the bridge like they are about due again. We were going to walk back over the bridge, but the guy at the Comet Line flying fox told us we could do the tandem line back for a 2 for 1 deal. So we did. I got to sit in front with Adam behind me. It got going pretty fast, and was a lot less scary than the bridge (which was right next to it). Also a lot faster. At the end we hit some stoppers that made us fly up a bit and it was fun.
We continued driving after that toward Westport where we could get some more cashola. While we were there we found a knife-making workshop we wanted to do, so we also signed up to do that tomorrow. It looks awesome. It’s an all day affair, so hopefully our arms are strong enough to forge. We drove south along the coast after that and had some lunch at a beach along the way. The coast down from Westport reminded us a lot of Big Sur back at home. Lots of cliffs and pretty scenery from the road (that can get curvy). We went to Punakaiki and saw
Buller Gorge
Down by the river the Pancake Rocks even though it was raining. They are crazy looking. It’s strange that geologists can’t even figure out exactly how exactly they got the way they are. After the loop, we went and got a camp site in Punakaiki and Adam decided he wanted to go back to the Pancake Rocks at high tide to see how the waves were crashing around. It was fun going back because we were able to see the blowholes in action!
That evening we cooked dinner in the camp kitchen facilities, which were really nice (and also had electrical plugs to charge our stuff up). We ended up having dinner with another couple staying there who were from San Diego. We also drank our plastic growler full of local beer we had picked up in Motueka. On our drive back down from Abel Tasman, we stopped off at Monkey Wizard, which is just a small microbrewery that only sells beer to go. You can sample what they have, but they don't have an on-site drinking permit, so they offer two sizes of container to go. We got a pretty tasty wheat beer. I liked it better than a lot of the
Buller Gorge
Some rock piles by the river wheat beers at home. It seemed to have more flavor. Plus drinking beer with good company is always a fun time.
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