Day 37

Jack woke up pretty early and couldn’t sleep so I had to get up. Quick snack and clean up of myself, I followed him gone at the lake again to check if we could see the mountains. It was sunny but chilly morning and most of the snowy tops were visible. After a few shots, we went back to Sue, had a more consistent breakfast. We stopped next to see some water turbines as Jack was fascinated by them. Sadly the river water was infected by the Didymo, the vicious algae that contaminate NZ water. Heading down, we obviously had to check out the Clifton Caves, a very big, muddy and wet cave structure under sheep paddocks. I didn’t really feel like crawling in mud and damp again my boots which had started to dry a little… (lucky Jack told me the plastic bag technique!). We went in a bit and turned back, bumping of course into a French couple as we were looking for the lower entrance. Jack went to explore again, this time with a French lady for company. We all ended up chatting in the parking… in French (too bad for Jack!). Lots of different adventures and trips. It was interesting to learn about their trips and future plans.

We exchanged our blogs and headed down, in the same direction as the single French traveller. Quick stop we looked at a historic bridge before keeping driving west to the lake Hauroko. Little walk there after a fast lunch and fighting against sand-flies, they returned! I went back to my ninja mode during the drive and improved my sand-fly killing numbers…. so many in the car! We headed to the big totara track. No one was around and we went through a lovely forest, surrounded by trees over 1000 years old. They were massive! At Tuatapere, we has wedges and chips, did a little shopping and stopped at the toilets. Almost ready to go, we met again Esther (Es-ter), the French lady, who was still heading the same way.

We searched for an inexistent wetland and kept going south to blue cliffs beach. There wasn’t many accesses to the beach and the track wasn’t maintained very well but we did a 2h return walk on the Hump Ridge Track to the hut village near the beach. The track was nice though and protected under trees, lots of steps and a damaged bridge. A little satisfied after spending lots of time in the car that day, we had a quick look at the Kraken Nest (a very windy lookout) and went to the free camping site we saw on campermate. There we met Esther, as we planned before, had a bid chat until it was dark and some dinner under the sea wind. We decided to visit Monkey Island in the morning as the tide was coming in and i already soaked my boots in the sea water that night.

Entree Written By Marianne