(Our Beach Hut, Panakaiki, New Zealand, 16th February 2008)
(Lake Matheson, New Zealand, 15th February 2008)
(On the beach, Nelson, New Zealand, 19th February 2008)
It’s the 15th February and we’re tramping along a trail that we thought led to the Fox Glacier. It actually leads to a bridge over the stream that comes away from Fox Glacier, and it takes us roughly an hour to figure this out, necessitating an hour’s tramp the other way back to the car.
The drive today has been fairly spectacular – well, the views along the way have been anyway. Waterfalls, Rapids, and ropey looking (single lane) bridges providing the only access in or out of the mountain roads are par for the course around here, and we spend a good 4 hours on today’s drive.
When we finally find the right starting point, it is another hour walk to the face of the glacier, which, it turns out, is a dirty great block of ice. Dirty being the operative word. It’s impressive as a lump of ice, but, I don’t know… I leave feeling a bit underwhelmed.
Our stopping place tonight is The Ivory Tower, which is a much more promising name than the actual reality of the place. However, our room is a family room and has a kitchenette, bathroom, and room for another four people all for NZ$90, and we cook, watch telly, write, drink coffee and through our window watch a Japanese man get increasingly irate with his inability to park. We don’t leave the room all evening, and it’s quite nice, until I have another night of not being able to sleep.
We’re up and out early the next morning and take the short drive to Lake Matheson. The reason for coming here is very apparent half way through the hour and a half walk around it, when you reach the viewing point. The lake is perfectly still and provides an amazing mirror image of the mountain range behind it, and we agree that this is what they mean by photo opportunity.
It’s warm walking through the rain-forest by the lake and we welcome the coffee and bagel at the café conveniently placed near the car park. It’s a long drive today but 20 minutes in we decide to stop at a small village where there seems to be some kind of event going on. We pay our 5 bucks to get in and find a small version of the Suffolk Show – livestock, the latest in tractors and farm machinery, a bar, a magician (really) and a wood chopping contest, which holds our attention for a good 30 minutes before we hit the road again, another hour off schedule.
We follow the same car for over 80 km, before stopping at ‘God Knows’ Lake – at least that’s what Chelle called it – which turns out to be another beautifully scenic place to ourselves. Chelle takes over driving, so I rest my eyes a little, and by 5.00pm we reach our destination, Panakaiki. We stop at the Pancake Rocks, so called because the weather has eroded them away and they look like, well, a pile of pancakes, and drive the last couple of miles to the hostel we have booked.
We know that the place is on the beach, and we think that we saw it from the cliffs by the Pancake Rocks, but we are not prepared for our room. The owner, a German who has been there for 10 years, seems like a nice guy, and he greets us before taking us back outside the building and over to a wooden hut. This is our room, and it is essentially a beach hut and just big enough for the bed, but it has a wooden balcony, a couple of chairs, and a view of the beach. It’s fantastic. We can’t wait to get sorted and sit down, so we race to the nearest bar for a carry out and settle down with our books, which we hardly take any notice of thanks to this amazing scene in front of us.
An hour after sitting down we walk the ten yards to the beach, sit down on the rocks and watch the sunset. Outstanding. Happy? You bet we are.
We cook, eat, and sit outside our room all night, watching over at the main building as a bus load of older German ladies arrive and turn the kitchen into Piccadilly Circus.
Waking up and being able to walk onto the beach is very cool, and we reluctantly pack and load the car. Today is a driving day and we fill up with petrol next to the ‘no gas for 105km’ sign, before heading through a number of one-horse towns, as well as some one-house towns. One is called Harihari, and we read later that an author joked that it’s the only place named after it’s two residents. A regulation picnic breaks up the days driving, and we get to Motueka, the nearest town to our hostel, at about 5 in the evening. We stock up at the supermarket and navigate the final 10km of today’s journey up the side of a hill, and up the steepest driveway so far to a splendidly isolated hostel on the side of a mountain.
We unload and head back down to Marahau beach for a while, and it’s beautiful. The evening is spent cooking, reading and sleeping. It’s a big day for Chelle tomorrow.
It’s a 6.00am wake up call for Chelle to go kayaking. I’ve declined the offer, preferring to stay back at the hostel and catch up on some writing. I had arranged to pick her up at the beach at lunch time, and when I wake at 9.00am, there is a note on the door telling me that She’ll be back at a later time.
After a leisurely morning of tapping away while sitting outside the kitchen I drive down to the beach and wait by the aqua-taxi place. The beach here is so shallow that there is a fleet of tractors waiting to drive out and pick up the boats as they reach the shallowest bit they can still use. I watch an aqua-taxi wait about half a mile out until it can get close enough to the tractor’s trailer. I can only imagine that appointments around here have an hour leeway. Either way.
Chelle’s had a brilliant time kayaking up the coast with her new Canadian friend, and the instructor who takes people kayaking in New Zealand for half a year, and then spends the other half in Canada as a ski instructor. Not bad, I suppose.
We lunch at the hostel and then drive to Split Apple Rock beach, which has a 15 minute walk from the car park and, as it says on the tin, is a large, round rock, which is split in half, and looks a bit like an apple. The beach is beautiful and quite empty, but there is a different tourist boat arriving in the bay every ten minutes, which gets a bit annoying.
Further down the twisty-turny-Chelle-feels-a-bit-sicky road is one of The Guardian reader’s Top 5 beaches of all time, like, ever, right? Kaiteriteri is a nice beach, but it’s full of families, boat trips (all the ones we saw at Split Apple Rock start here), and poor quality fast food, so we can only think that the Guardian readers must have got the name mixed up with the one near where we are staying…
We check out Stephen’s Bay and watch a windsurfer take, like, forever, hello! to sort himself out and finally get out in the water, just as the wind died down, and then we head back to cook. We start chatting with a Dutch couple called Barry and Nora, who are both nurses, but Barry is about to train as a paramedic. It feels like we’ve been talking all night and it seems really late, but when we get back to the room it’s only 10.30pm. Chelle is out like a light, I struggle to sleep again.
The next day we realise we need to find somewhere to sleep that night, and spend a while in a phone box calling places in the Lonely Planet book. The eleventh place, a camp site, has a cabin, and we book it. Coffee and a quick stint in an internet café later, and we’re on our way to Nelson. It’s not far, so by lunchtime we’re dumping our bags at the cabin, which turns out to be the best one we’ve had by a long way, and following our instructions to get to Jan’s house.
Jan is my friend Shane’s big sister, and she has been in Nelson along with her two daughters, for a few years after a two year sailing-around-the-world trip. They docked in Nelson harbour and, well, just stayed. We hadn’t seen her or the girls for quite a while, and it was so nice to see her, and sit out on the balcony and catch up and drink tea all afternoon. She was working a late shift later, so left them to get on and headed for the beach – well, we hadn’t seen any sand for a few hours.
We got to the beach by about 6 in the evening, and walked a fair way along it, with half of the people in Nelson (or so it seemed) walking their dogs. A field nearby was full of groups of children training for the new Rugby season, and we watch for a while before picking up some take out pizza and heading back to our comfy room.
It’s our last day on South Island the next day, and we check out downtown Nelson, having lunch at the Lambretta Café. Chelle walks up to ‘The Centre of New Zealand’ – a plaque which is at, well, you have a guess, and I find a friendly guitar store who let me sit and have a strum without the sales talk.
The road to Picton is even more twisty-turny than any we’d been on before, and the 2 hour journey wasn’t one of Chelle’s favourites, but the views we’re outstanding. Picton town would take around ten minutes to walk around, but it’s the kick off point for all ferries over to the North Island, so we drop off the car and get a lift to the terminal. It’s all very efficient, and by 5.45pm we’re on the boat and leaving South Island. It’s a huge ferry and seems quite empty, but Chelle wouldn’t know because she’s up on the top deck, outside, trying not to be sick. She’s been dreading this crossing, having heard all sorts of tales about exactly how rough it can get, but it turns out to be the calmest and flattest of all our journeys.
It’s dark when we dock in Wellington, and as we emerge from the ferry terminal we spot our friend Brett waiting for us. We have the next few days with him, his wife Lotty and their son Louis in and around the capital of New Zealand, Windy Wellington.
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