The 7th started off much different than every other day I have had on the trip.
I woke up at 4:00 something, I think around 4:45, maybe? To find the Chase was not in the car with me. I wondered if he had even come back or if something had happened to him and the girl he’d gone on a walk with.
Concerned, I got myself dressed and headed out into the darkness up the Sand dune Hill and back down the other side to the beach. Part of me expected to see them together, but no.
I walked from the place where we played our games over to the hot water portion of the beach, thinking that maybe they had just kept talking and dug themselves some hot water pools to sit in, as it was very cold outside, and they weren’t dressed for an all-nighter and that kind of cold.
But it had been an all-nighter.
When I found no one at the hot water pools, I looked South down the beach and saw a light blinking in the distance. Knowing that headlamps often have a blinking light feature, I decided to head that way to see what the light might be.
After walking for quite a ways, walking all the way to where the sea met the river and was extremely wide, I was satisfied that they had not gone that way. The flashing light was all the way on the other side of the super wide river/sea inlet.
As I began to walk north of the beach, I noticed that there were what looks like fresh tire tracks on the beach. It was at that point that my concern level heightened fairly significantly. Instead of just looking around, I began yelling for both of them as I walked North up the beach.
As a side note, the sunrise was absolutely gorgeous.
Not finding them on my journey south, and with the fresh tire tracks, I started heading back to where we were parked. I hadn’t gone over to the girls camper van to see if the one girl was there because I didn’t want to bother them in case they were both there and asleep. But with the tire tracks on the beach, and with me unable to find hide nor hair of them, and then with me finding the one girls’ sandals on the beach without her in them, I decided it was definitely time to go and see if the likely missing girl was in her camper van or if it was just the other girl.
It took a few taps on the camper van window and calling her name a few times before she woke up. I asked her if the other girl was in the van with her, and she said no. I proceeded to then tell her what I had been doing all morning, what I had found with the tire tracks, and the empty sandals and whatnot, and that neither Chase nor she had come back, and so she said she was going to get her clothes on and help me go look for them.
I started heading back up the sand dunes to go back down toward the beach, running into a couple of hedgehogs along the way. I had sent messages to Chase asking if they were okay, but we were in such a bad reception area, that they weren’t going through. I sent the messages anyway because periodically even in bad reception areas messages will sporadically go through.
Just as the one girl was beginning to walk up the Sand dune Hill, I got a message from Chase saying that they were okay. Then about 10 minutes later, Chase and the other girl appeared around coming up the sea side of the sand dunes.
So after a very short night sleep, and a lot of searching around the beach fully, they were okay. They had just spent a long night talking and walking and whatnot along the beach together.
So, that was good (good that they were ok, I mean 🙃).
As wide awake as I was at the time, I didn’t bother trying to go back to sleep. Chase got back to the car and bed down for a nap, having not slept at all during the night, and I went out to the beach to just sort of stand there staring out at the ocean like I often do.
After a while, though, the exhaustion caught up with me, and I borrowed a little sand burrow that someone had carved out of the sand near where the trail goes up to dunes and back to the parking lot. I covered my face so it’s not to get sunburned, and I fell asleep, getting a good, long nap on the beach. 😁
From the warm water beach, we headed south to Marakopa Falls. After a short hike down to the viewing area for the falls, we found that the stairs and whatnot had a sign saying to not use them because of damage. Since I’ve been in new zealand, I’ve been a little more relaxed with my rules of always sticking to following signs and boundaries and whatnot.
Gratefully, one of the girls is a lot like me in the sense that she has a strong conscience bone and doesn’t like to do anything inappropriate or inconsiderate or wrong or whatever you want to call it. When we got to the platform and Chase and the other girl and I were about to go over the side and climb down toward the waterfall, she hung back.
I knew right away why she was hanging back, and a part of my conscience was stung at how lacks I had become, that I was not following my own moral values for respecting boundaries and prohibitions and whatnot.
So instead of climbing down with the others, I stayed up there with her. It was a little awkward, and she doesn’t talk much and I, still in my shell, wasn’t doing well with silence, so I made conversation as best I could.
We went and explored to see if there were any other possible ways down to the waterfall that weren’t passing over the fence of the viewing area, but we didn’t find any.
Another traveler that morning had mentioned that there was an upper viewing area for the falls, so I decided to go look for it. The one girl, perhaps tired of my company? didn’t want to continue wandering around with me, so I left her at the overlook and headed back up the trail and up the road to see what else I could find.
Back up at the road, I wandered around for a little bit but didn’t find any upper viewing area for the falls. Being my adventurous self, I decided to head up river to see what else of interest there might be. The vegetation on the side of the road was extremely thick, and from the road down to the river, the slope was a near sheer drop many meters below.
But as I walked, I found two more waterfalls that I didn’t know existed and that weren’t on the maps. I only knew they were there because as I walked up the road I could hear the thundering of the falls next to me, and I had already passed the main Falls that everyone goes to much further down river. So I knew there were at least two more waterfalls that I couldn’t see.
You know me well enough to know what’s coming next. 🙃
I didn’t have my water shoes on, so I started heading back down the road to the car to get my water shoes. On my way down the road, though, I ran into chase, who was coming to look for me, having been told by the one girl that I was wandering up above trying to find another view of the waterfall.
I showed Chase where I was interested in going, and he thought it was super cool, so we planned to head there next. In the meantime, though, we needed to head back to the cars, as the girls and we were getting ready to go our separate ways.
That was really hard on chase, as he had grown very close to one of the girls over the last handful of days. They spent a good little while talking by themselves, and the other girl and I had probably our longest and perhaps best conversation of the whole time we’ve been together. 🙃 It was good.
Once we said goodbye to the girls, it was pretty rough on Chase. He and I talked about what all he was feeling as we headed back up the river to explore the falls that I could only hear through the trees.
You know, as I’m sure you’ve gathered both from me talking about my experiences, and from reading about others, that many of my favorite places have come while exploring the surroundings of more famous places.
Such was the case with what we found up River of the main Marakopa Falls.
The first thing you see when you go down to the river (I found a place where the drop off was more like 10 ft instead of 50 ft), is solid bedrock all the way across where the river is running, except for maybe a six or seven foot wide really deep channel carved right through the middle of the river that the water was rushing through.
On the road side of the channel where we were coming from, the water was only just a few inches deep. Then there was the frothing rushing powerful water churning and heaving itself through the channel in the middle, and then the Rock bed on the other side of the channel was dry.
The rushing water in the channel quickly gave way to a waterfall with something like three different drop off levels. The water rushing fast enough that if you fell in, there’s no way you would avoid going over the falls without significant luck.
But the only way to really get a good view of the falls and to go explore the next falls down, was to cross that little channel. So I stood on the edge of the channel, knowing that I could make the jump, but wanting to be super careful because I was jumping from a wet, mossy outcropping and not from dry rock.
I had a brief thought about how it was going to be more difficult getting back, as we’d be jumping not from wet to dry, but from dry to wet. Landing on a wet mossy outcropping being a good bit more dangerous than starting from the mossy outcropping and landing on the dry space.
We’ll deal with the return trip later. 🙃
Anyway, the falls were absolutely beautiful, coming down in several different cascading platforms of various heights. I took lots and lots of pictures, none of which I’m able to post here because of technological difficulties I’ll be explaining quite shortly. 🙃
After exploring and enjoying that first section, and then the first of the two waterfalls that I knew existed but couldn’t see from the road, the only way to get further downstream was to cross through the woods. Gratefully, New Zealand being new zealand, we don’t have to worry about nasty critters in the bush. We can just walk through without a care.
So we bypassed some deep portions of the river by going through the woods until we got to the second waterfall that I could hear but couldn’t see.
At first, we tried to see the waterfall from the top, but there was not so much luck with that as the water was too deep and too swift to want to make an attempt to get to the spot that looked like it could be a lookout spot for the rest of the falls.
So again we turned to the bush in the hopes that we’d find a way to view it, and… we did… ish. The canyon walls were far too steep to get down, so we created ourselves a little perch at the top of the drop off/overhang.
We sat there and just talked for a while. Then we tried to find a way to get down to the bottom of the cliff, but there wasn’t a safe way to get all the way down, so we climbed back up from where we’d gone.
After that, we decided to give one last attempt at getting a good view of the falls (our perch only got us so far).
I climbed back in the water in a spot that was probably a little sketchier than I should have gone, but I was able to make it to the center of the river probably 15 or 20 ft before the falls. I was excited because I had a great picture to take, but as I pulled my phone out of my pocket, it slipped out of my hand and came crashing down screen first on a rounded Rock probably about the size of a golf ball.
Even though T-Mobile had told my mom that the screen protector they were giving her that I was buying was tempered glass, it definitely was not tempered glass. Thus, when the cell phone can crashing down to the Rock below, instead of the tempered glass shattering, the weakling screen protector that was pretty much just a glorified scratch protector, had absolutely no protection, and the screen completely shattered, so hard that it busted it all the way to the core to the point that it wouldn’t even light up.
Not so good. 😬
$800 phone. Toast.
Oops. 🙃
Gratefully, Chase was able to get at least a few pictures. He found a way across and around, and I just kept going across the way I was going, and we were able to get to the top of the waterfall, and I was able to get down the side of it, though I no longer had a camera to take pictures of it. Chase took a few pictures from the top, but the view that I was able to see after scrambling down the side and in front of it is unfortunately not recorded in photo history, nor is it likely that I’d ever be able to find photos of it online as probably just about no one knows the waterfall even exists. 😕
Too bad.
Oh well.
We started heading back, after seeing a pretty large eel, and after noticing that the light of the evening was fading.
Instead of trying to traverse any more water, I just headed straight for the bush and walked all the way around to the bottom of the first Falls. I waited for chase, and once he was with me, we headed back over to where we had first crossed starting out.
Looking at what we had to jump to get back, I was reminded of the little thought I had as we were crossing the first time. Trying to go from dry to wet was a much more daunting task than going from wet to dry. If we slipped on our landing and slipped backward, we would end up in the drink and then over the falls. It wasn’t likely that we would fall backward, but the other possibility was blowing out a knee because the landing wasn’t solid or taking a tumble in the water, again because the landing was slippery and not solid.
Not wanting to risk joining the drink and tumbling over the falls, we decided to see if there were another way around. I tried a couple crossings, but the water was too deep. Upriver a little bit, I saw what I thought was a fairly shallow crossing. The water looked like it was going over rocks in every single part of the river at the particular section I wanted to cross, which meant that I should have decent footing to cross the river.
So I crawled up the bank, walked around to that spot of the river, climbed back down the bank, and attempted to try and cross. At the spot where I thought there was going to be a rock, I let my leg down and tried to reach the Rocky bottom. Unfortunately, I did not find bottom. The water was so fast and so much deeper than I thought it was going to be that I ended up falling completely in up to my neck and getting very quickly pulled downstream. My smashed phone was in one pocket, my electronic car keys in the other. Both of them zipped up inside a waterproof jacket.
Gratefully, I was able to kick my way over to a big rock on one side of the river and hold on. I had been underwater except for my head for probably 15 seconds or so, but miraculously, when I unzipped my pockets not a single drop of water had gotten into the pockets of my waterproof jacket.
Props and thanks to my mom for getting me a waterproof jacket and waterproof pants as an early birthday and Christmas present!
Thx, Mom!!!
After several failed attempts at crossing the river in different places, the last one being that massive fail where I got pulled all the way in and sent down the river a little ways, we finally gave up and decided to just go back the way we had come originally.
I wasn’t super excited about it, but there didn’t seem to be any other decent options available to us, so I plucked up the courage and just went for it, landing without any issues at all, gratefully.
Chase then followed suit, and gratefully, we were able to get back to the car only wet but not otherwise harmed, aside from my poor smashed Google pixel 7 pro.
Not so easy to be without a phone these days, especially when I have businesses to run from afar and whatnot.
It’s been really nice to be traveling with chase, because he’s really easy going and not worried really much about anything, so after smashing my phone, it seems like the logical choice would be to head to a larger nearby City in the hopes that I could get the phone repaired. So without any thought or concern, we drove from where we were out in the middle of nowhere back all the way up to Hamilton, spending the night a little ways outside of the city on the side of the road.
And… that was perhaps the craziest day of the entire trip–early morning search and rescue, painful goodbyes, and a smashed phone, among other things. 🙃
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 