I’m writing this one today on December 11th New Zealand time, December 10th back home.
Still quite a ways behind, not having made up any ground since I only did one entry yesterday 🙃
Anyway, going back to November 29th, it was a rough night sleep. My hip was hurt worse than I thought it was, and I usually sleep on my left side, and that was the side my hip was hurt on. So instead of sleeping on my left side, I slept on my back which I don’t like doing, but didn’t have much of a choice with the cramped quarters with two of us sharing the back of a wagon.
So it was a rough night without much sleep, but I suppose that’s not anything new. 🙃
With it being hard to sleep, I ended up getting up really early that morning and going down on the beach to just sort of hang out in the early hours of the morning when all was quiet. I mostly just sort of sat there in the sand enjoying the sound of the waves as they rolled in.
I love the sounds of the ocean waves crashing against the water and against the shore.
🥰
As far as the water is concerned, I definitely prefer fresh water to salt water, but there aren’t many lakes around the world that are big enough to have tides come in and out.
So I love the oceans for that reason. The girls had a hike they wanted to do in the hills a good bit West of Gisborne, and I had a few places I wanted to visit that were historical sites, so to speak, for my relative, as he had lived and served his mission in the area.
So we said goodbye to the girls with the expectation that we would probably meet up later that day to visit Shine Falls together.
Chase and I drove way out of town into the country on winding dirt roads through bright green hills until we got to the little farmhouse where my relative had lived for a portion of his mission with an old Maori shepherd.
It was fun to be on the phone with Richard sending him pictures and talking about where I was. That particular relative has an absolutely fantastic memory, so he remembered all sorts of things about the area, and it was fun to share that with him.
Back in town, I managed to find an apartment to use to live at (because he still remembered the address 🙃). And then a little while after that, I found the house of someone he respected a lot while he was on his mission. Unfortunately, though their front door was open such that I could see into the house and verify that they were still members of the LDS Church, nobody answered the door, so I wasn’t able to say hi for my relative like I was hoping to.
Oh! I didn’t mention that one of the first things I did that morning was grab a disposable razor and shave. 😶
I pretty much never used disposable razors, and when I shave, I pretty much never shave all the way to the bare skin even with an electric razor because my face breaks out so badly. But all I had was the disposable razor, and I was looking pretty shaggy. Certainly didn’t feel like my best in the company of an attractive woman–even if she was already taken. 🙃
So I went ahead and shaved, using just soap and the disposable razor on basically beard length whiskers. That took… forever. 🙃
I figured I would probably break out quite badly over the next several days and have lots of ingrown hairs, which is what usually happens when I use a disposable razor, but it was either that or nothing for the moment, so I decided to just go ahead and shave with the disposable razor.
I mentioned it now because I didn’t realize what was happening. After shaving, at some point I put on sunscreen, and I put it all over my neck where I just shaved. Well, apparently I’m allergic to the sunscreen if it gets into little cuts, and I had all sorts of little cuts and scrapes from the straight razor all over my neck, which had my neck pretty much swell up as though it had hives all over it.
Pretty gnarly looking. 😬
Anyway, so on our way back into town from visiting the places that I was trying to visit for richard, we stopped off at the McDonald’s or something, where I washed my neck off with soap and water in order to reduce the reaction. That worked, and over the course of probably the next hour or two all of the little hives went back down, and my neck looked mostly normal. I have a picture that I’ll post at some point in time, but I’m technologically unable right now for reasons I will explain much later.
Te Reinga Falls, our next stop, much like the ReRe Rock Slide the day before was a complete surprise, becoming at the time, and continuing to the present moment, my favorite waterfall in all of New Zealand that I’ve been to so far, and quite possibly my favorite waterfall that I’ve ever been to in my life.
From the overlook that they build for you, it was beautiful, but with some pretty hefty exploration, it was breathtaking. I found the path that led down the mini gorge to the little lake at the end of the mini gorge. I then very very carefully walked along the exposed face of the mini gorge. It’s a whole lot easier to understand with pictures and videos, which I have many of, but again technology issues won’t let me upload anything at the moment.
In an effort to describe it, if you can picture standing on the edge of a lake that’s probably only a couple hundred yards in diameter and a fairly decent circle, and then you look up River and you see a rocky cliffs on both sides and then little shelves sticking out right below the rocky cliff on each side, and then another drop off in the Middle where the water has carved a channel out completely that the water rushes through to get down to the lake, that’s what you’re looking at.
The Falls Cascades down in many different places and many different levels, crashing down into the channel that the water has carved over so many gazillions of years and then rushing down down into the lake several hundred yards downstream.
So, if you can picture it, I was on the left side of the mini gorge walking along the shelf right below the first drop off but before the second drop off that goes into the water. The left side when looking from the lake up River. The view was spectacular, and the further I went, the more I enjoyed it.
At the same time, the further up the mini gorge I went, the more sketchy it was to follow the little shelf. The shelf was often wet from the mist, as well as other runoff from the sides of the cliff, so often times there was slippery moss in places.
Because of the wet Rock and moss, you had to be constantly careful that you weren’t slipping, because you would end up potentially sliding down from that shelf into the rushing waters of the channel below.
Still, as little Stephen always seems to do, I continued onward, getting to a point where the Rock shelf was only maybe a foot and a half wide before the quick slope down. It wasn’t a straight drop off in those places, just a slope down, but once you start slipping, it’s going to be pretty easy just to keep right on going. Possible to stop yourself, but also very possible you just keep right on going to the rushing water in the channel below.
Anyway, I kept going, extremely carefully, finding a little holes that the water had eroded out of the rock to put my fingers in so that I could have some kind of a hold to keep my body in position just in case feet or knees or whatever else slipped.
I told myself under and overhang, past the spot that was only maybe a foot and a half wide or whatever it was, and back to a safer area, eventually scaling probably a 12 or 14 ft huge chunk of rock that had fallen down and was laying vertically right near the edge of the one side of the falls.
I sat there just in awe of the beautiful scenery, the power of the roaring River as enormous amounts of water rushed over the precipice and crashed into the rushing River below.
It was a magical place.
I sat there for quite a while just enjoying the scenery, realizing that getting back was going to be more dangerous than coming in because now I was going to be going head first with a slight downward slope on very slippery surfaces covered in moss.
Though my reception was nearly non-existent in that area, I did manage to get a few messages over to chase, including one that asked him to get out his drone and take a video to show where I was in relation to the waterfalls and the cliffs and all that. Fortunately he was able to get the drone in the air and get a video of me showing where I was. That was pretty cool.
I tried to find another way up and out of the little gorge, but nothing was safer than going back the way I had come.
I took a couple of last videos on my phone to record where I’ve been just in case those happened to be the last videos I made. Perhaps a little over dramatic, but also possible that things might not go properly, and I might slide to my possible death. I think I told people that I love them on the video, and then I very slowly and very very carefully began the journey back. This time, it took a long long time because going downhill I wouldn’t let myself take any movement at all until I had completely wiped them off the Rock and turned it from slippery to sandpapery.
In taking that action every time I went to make a movement, the trip back actually turned out to be pretty unremarkable. It was slow, but it was safe, at least in my definition of safe. 🙃
Chase, at the beginning of our time there had taken his drone down into a spot on the other side of the falls that we couldn’t see from the side we were on, and the pictures that his drone was able to capture were absolutely incredible. After getting out and back up to the car, I wanted to go see if it was possible for a human to get down to where his drone was. So we drove over and parked on the other side, and I walked down to where I hoped I could get to where his drone had been.
I went down the steep embankment next to the bridge that goes over the river, then I walked along an extremely muddy shore where, if you weren’t careful, your feet could sink in up to your shins and even knees in just pure mud.
I bushwacked through the brush a little bit trying to avoid steep muddy embankments where I would slide into the pool of water that looks like an innocuous large pond before it spilled over into the beginning of the ferocious and powerful chain of waterfalls that make up Te Reinga Falls.
Eventually, after going down steep embankments, walking along muddy shorelines, walking over logs that when the cross streams, and bushwacking a little bit through brush, I was able to make it to the other side of the waterfall, and that’s where the real magic began. The Falls was already one of my favorites from the side I had just explored, but oh my golly, this section, and this view, from this side is what put it over the top is my favorite Falls that I’ve ever been to.
I climbed down multiple levels of rock outcropping that were wet but fortunately not slippery until I managed to make it all the way to the bottom where the thundering Falls crashed to the bottom of the mini gorge and the rushing River below.
It was absolutely breathtaking. So magical. I’m a waterfall guy through and through, and this was just amazing.
An icing on the cake came when in one of the large pools of water that had been created probably by a flash flood, I saw an absolutely massive freshwater eel, and I was able to get some good video of that before it swam underneath the rock to hide itself from me.
That was an incredible waterfall. Absolutely incredible. Rain started to roll in a little, so I decided I’d better get out before everything got even more wet than it was. So I climbed my way back to the car absolutely thrilled with my experience.
🥰
After that falls, we managed to get back in touch with the girls whom we were going to meet at shine Falls, but they had ended up already having gone to shine Falls and were skipping the hike they wanted to do because of the rain. It was already pretty late in the day because I’d stayed so long at Te Reinga Falls, but we booked it over to shine Falls in an effort to get there before dark.
Gratefully, we were successful in our efforts to get there before dark, and we jogged the trail over to shine Falls.
Shine Falls was yet another surprise. The pictures we’ve seen online didn’t do it anywhere near justice, much like the falls we’d just been to.
We stood there just staring at how beautiful and how big the Falls was and then, following the recommendation of a guy who made a book about the natural attractions of new zealand, did a little naked picture photo shoot, butt to the camera with the Falls cascading down, much like we did at new chums Beach in Northland, but with a waterfall this time. 🙃
We decided to meet up with the girls after that in Taupo, they having already had that way, which was all so our plan as well. So they found a camping place that was free and available for our situation as well. There are tons and tons of places for people who have what are called self-contained vehicles, which I think I’ve mentioned, but we are not self-contained, so we have a much more limited set of options to choose from when it comes to finding places to camp.
Anyway, they found a place where we could all stay, which was super nice of them, and we got there a bit late and bed down for the night.
We had a little bit of a cultural language barrier funny experience. We had invited them to watch a movie with us, and in the text that they wrote back to us they wrote the letters p h u as an acronym in capital letters. Having spent a good bit of time recently on dating apps and having run into lots of acronyms that I didn’t understand, I googled the acronym.
What did I find? PHU stood for potential hookup. 🙃
Chase and I were a little surprised by that, but Chase figured it probably meant something different than what the Google suggestion for Phu seems to say that it might be, but it was still interesting and funny to sort of guess and wonder what on Earth they were thinking. Anyway, they decided not to watch the movie with us that night, so we all headed to bed.
About 20 minutes or so after we went to bed, we felt something Rock our car extremely strongly almost as though there were four people rocking the car one on the front one on the rear and one on each side. Chase and I looked at each other and then i turned my cell phone flashlight on, opened the car door, and tried to see if anyone was still close enough to see.
We thought maybe the girls were playing a little bit of a prank on us, but when they actually called us scared because someone had rocked there van as well, we realized it wasn’t them. While I was outside the car, the person sleeping in the vehicle next to us asked me if someone had shaken our car as well, and I said yes, so we figured someone was just playing a prank and had quickly gone up and down the row of cars shaking each car as they went just to scare people or play a little fun prank on them.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t a fun prank for the girls, as one of the girls was pretty scared. My only concern was if they decided to do it again after I’d fallen asleep. I didn’t want to be woken up from sleep after finally falling asleep, especially with all the troubles that I have sleeping.
I started looking for an alternate place to spend the night in case the pranksters started doing it again. It wasn’t but a few minutes later, that the other of the girls sent me a message saying that it had just happened again, but that they were going to stick it out and not go to a different camping spot. We all decided to stay at that camping spot and not worry about it anymore, so we passed some of us peacefully, some of us less peacefully into dreamland for the night.
Love and hugs to all y’all. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 