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Published: October 19th 2009
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I believe Takaka is where I left off. We were hoping to catch some sunshine or even some non rainy clouds to enjoy more of the Golden Bay area. This did not happen, so with dampened spirits and dampened roads we just started driving again. As always our plans were vague, “let's drive someplace with less rain and maybe even some sunshine”. So over 500 km later and probably over 6 hours of windy roads we found ourselves once again at the end of the road. This time a place called Karamea, which is just a little town on the Tasman Sea that has lots of great hikes nearby. We found a good place to set up for the night. It was near the beach and had the cover of a large tree. We cooked up some food, had a guitar and harmonica jam til dark then retired to the van. It began to rain again. I fell asleep that night to the sound of raindrops tapping the roof of the van with dreams of sunshine and beautiful ocean breezes racing through my head.
The next morning I awoke and pulled back the curtain to see....sunshine!!! Maybe our plan worked,
but it is New Zealand and things can change rather quickly. We had to get to business quickly. So a quick coffee, a little drive into town to get a map of hikes and then some dirt road driving and we were on a track. The Heaphy Track, which is a famous hike here in New Zealand, is where we found ourselves. We decided on a shorter walk to a place called Scott's Beach (The Heaphy Track can be up to 5 days). In no time were were walking through the forest over creeks and following the shoreline with the roar of the wicked Tasman waves providing us with our hiking music. As happens when travelling you tend to meet random people and today happened to be one of those days. We walked around a corner and found a man crouching beside a waterfall with a gun strapped to his back. We startled him (that's great he had a gun) and when he moved we noticed a big piece of animal beside him. Under further investigation we found it to be the hind quarters of a deer. The man was quite happy to talk hunting with us and complain about
some things he didn't agree with. After a short chat we kept on to reach Scott's Beach.
The beach was beautiful, it had a little river that winded its way around the beach before joining the Tasman Sea. The waves were crashing against the shoreline. We lingered for awhile just enjoying the scenes in front of us. We carried on to a little picnic site where we met a middle aged man named Peter. We decide to join Peter for lunch and joined him with our sardine sandwiches (cheap and nutritious). After a few moments of small talk Peter began to tell us more and more. We got a lot of advice on life, everything from mortgages to woman. It seemed a random place to have such a conversation, but many wise words were spoken that shall linger in my head for days to come. Peter was a geologist and suggested we visit some caves nearby. So we rushed back to the van (they were some cloud movements above) to visit these caves.
It took about 30 minutes of gravel roads that tended to either be uphill or have a harcore bend in them. But Lucy in the
Sky was ready and we manouvered our way to see the Moria Arches. We had to do a walk through a very beautiful forest full of moss covered trees and home to many shades of greens. To reach the arches we had to climb down into the cavern. This little opening that we crawled through opened up to a huge cavern with a river running through it. Snapped a few photos and crawled back out. After reuniting with Lucy we noticed that the clouds were up to their old tricks and figured we should get driving.
We raced the clouds south, leaving them in the mountains behind us. Once we hit the west coast we had a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon drive. Stopped to see the Pancake Rocks in Punakaki (still have no clue why there are called Pancake Rocks). We rolled into Greymouth before 7pm. Ralphy needed to do some laundry and get a shower so we found a little place for his fix. But while waiting for laundry to dry we had a little altercation with some guy who I guess worked there. We were polite but definitely angered by this old man. Following that we found
a place to park for the night, that night it happened to be a rugby field parking lot.
Today we woke to rain. We both had a bad taste in our mouths about Greymouth (no pun intended) and decided to get outta town. Today was another driving day, we decided to stay in Franz Josef. Due to the rain we found a cheap hostel and gave ourselves a break from Lucy. Tomorrow Ralph is off for a glacier hike and I have no real plans for me. A few ideas but I will see what the weather looks like as every other day.
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