Day 42

Sleeping in this morning because of our late night, we noticed strait away the empty spot nest to us. Where was Esther and her van? After breakfast, I texted her to learn that we misunderstood each other the night before. She was already at Fortrose, ready to go back to bed after her late night. We drove then to the recycling station to put away our garbage. On the way to Fortrose we made a stop to do the 1.5km return track in Waituna Wetlands. The walk was nice and quiet but we got quickly hot without sea breeze and lots of sunshine this morning. Plenty of little bees around and small birds. The sand flies were everywhere of course and we were already dealing with old inflamed and itchy bites. We met Esther at the Fortrose Campsite, having a slow morning and napping. At lunchtime we made more pasta to finish of the leftover bolognese sauce (yummy with cheese!). All fed up, we drove separately to Waipapa point. It started to rain at this time but we managed to explote, seeing the lighthouse and few sea lions. One of them was swimming near the beach and never got out of the water probably because of all the tourists watching him. Esther caught up with us in the mean time and we all went to do a big walk at Waipohatu.

We made it in 2 hours, slipping and tripping a lot on branches and mud. It was a quite hard as the rain fell heavily during all our walk. Most of the path was covered by deep mud and water puddles. The track led us to two nice waterfalls and we asked some other hikers to get a picture of us. Lucky, the way back down wasn’t in the forest which avoided me to fall more. All muddy, we had to change clothes and shoes before driving to the next campsite. We had a quick look at slope point track but the rain was still falling and we had to go through a poopy sheep paddock. Stopping at the campsite nearby we didn’t really like the location, the single small toilet, the muddy land, the lake near us (sand flies home!), and how busy it was! We drove back to Fortrose, much better, sunny but windy! Esther tried to be friendly with some French people and regretted it after all. We even waved at a few camper vans and got royally ignored… I called the lady for the house in Dunedin again, and got us to stay in a day earlier than planned. Indeed, we estimated the drive to Dunedin to take us a week but nit seemed like it was way quicker. We had dinner while Esther had beers. She wasn’t feeling to goof and drove away to have a smoke. We caught up a little on writing the blog before going to bed. Parking spot got quickly filled up by camper vans.

Entree Written By Marianne