Both Chase and I have been sleeping terribly lately. 🙃
I think maybe that’s because we’ve slowed down a good bit in our travels. In the beginning, we were go go go all the time, so we were completely hammered when we finally went to bed, so we slept better just because of sheer exhaustion.
Wait… Even when I’m dead dog tired, I’m not sleeping well. Well, I guess that throws that out the window. 🙃
Anyway, I got up the morning of the 10th a good bit earlier than Chase once again. I sort of just hung around the campsite, using the bathroom, sitting on a swing that was attached to a nearby tree.
Had kind of an odd, unspoken introduction to those who are camping next to us. They opened the rear hatch of their van, and the 20-something woman inside was obviously not wearing any clothes but wrapped up enough in her blanket to be covered. But not too much later after that, while I was sitting on the swing, I looked back towards our cars, and what do I see? The woman with her pants down standing at the back of her van.
😶
Um… cute butt, but… really? What the…
I quickly looked away. 🙃
After Chase got up, we headed over to meet our friends at Hokitika Gorge. I thought they would beat us there because we were running a little late, but we were both running late, and they got there only a handful of minutes after we did.
Instead of heading right over to the bridge, given that it was still relatively early in the morning (around 9:30?) And that none of us had gotten much sleep, we stayed parked there at a little gravel ish pull out below the trail where we all ate a leisurely breakfast (i think mine was an apple or two and a whole bunch of granola bars.
Picture of health. 🙃
After our breakfast, it was on to the Gorge and the Swing Bridge we’d be jumping from. I was excited to show our friends the Gorge, both because of how incredibly blue it was, and also because the jump had been one of the fun highlights of our trip, and I always wanted to share those kinds of things with the people who are important to me.
At first, I was a little disappointed because at first glance the Gorge didn’t seem as blue as I remembered from our last visit, and I had wanted our friends to see it the way that we saw it–that striking, vibrant blue.
Fortunately, as the sun rose higher in the sky as the morning went on, it shown more directly on the gorge, and the blueness really began to stand out just like it had the other times that Chase and I had been there. So I was happy that they were able to see it in all its blue Glory. 😊
I’m pretty sure Chase jumped first. I think one of our friends jumped second while the other filmed it all from below (at our getting-out spot).
It be was fun to be able to be there to encourage our friend to jump and then see her excitement as she overcame her fears again and again until it was more fun than scary. 😊
I think i only jumped… 5 times? Still, it was fun. 😊 Chase jumped a bunch of times, including one from the cables themselves, adding three feet or so to the height.
I think the jump was already a good bit higher than the first time. It looked shorter, but the gravel bar that we thought before was a rock, was so close to the surface that it was easy to tell it was a gravel bar, so a I’m thinking it was at least a foot+ lower than it was before.
Anyway, so I’m guessing that the jump we had been doing was now closer to 45 get instead of 43.5, and with Chase jumping from the a cables, I think he was probably closer to 48.
Nice job, Chase! 💪😎
I don’t remember how high my cliff jump in Costa Rica was, the high high one. I remember thinking it was super high, higher than anything I’d jumped off to that point, but I think Hokitika Gorge is probably a tad higher. Just a guess, though. I’ve day I’ll figure it out maybe.
There was a family that saw us jump and decided they wanted to jump as well, a couple and one of their parents, I think it was. It was so cool to see the older guy jump. I mean, it was fun to see them all jump (though the woman landed badly and was pretty sore). The older gentleman was probably… A late 50s? Maybe 60s?
So fun to see him jump. 😊
Great times had by all. 😊
After the swing bridge jumping, we walked over to the boulders and “beach” area that attract most visitors. It was a bit crowded but nice. I jumped off the rock a few times.
Oh! My first swing bridge jump was the best jump of all my jumps from any of the swing Bridges or bridges that we’ve jumped from the whole trip. The landing was perfect. No water up my nose whatsoever. It was phenomenal! 🥳🎉🥳
After hanging out at the Rock for a little while, we finished walking around the track, across the much taller swing bridge where the water is far too shallow to jump from, sadly, and then back to our cars.
We asked our friends if they’d like to get some dinner, but they said they were going to go ahead and just do their own thing for dinner, so we said goodbye to our friends, I for the last time, and then we headed into town, where I stopped into the grocery store to buy sugar and caffeine to keep me awake on the drive from hokitika all the way to Twizel, or somewhere near there (I was absolutely hammered from multiple days of lack of sleep, and so is chase, but he’d been driving mostly, so it was my turn 🙃).
Then we went to Subway and got some Subway sandwiches, I getting some sort of weird vegetarian thing that was actually pretty decent.
And with that, we were off! Back across Arthur’s path, with me guzzling mountain dew, eating donuts, and whatever the other sugary things were that I bought. I forget what they were at this point.
The forecast turned out to be absolutely correct: we ran into rain on the drive, but gratefully, it wasn’t too wet at the campsite that we found near Lake Tekapo. I think it was actually mostly dry in that particular area.
Oh! One thing that I haven’t mentioned, is that I think I’m actually developing a resistance to the sand fly bites. The last handful of times that I’ve been bitten, sure it’s itched a decent bit at the beginning, but then it seems to basically go away. I think I’ve made a greater effort to not scratch as well, which should also help quite a bit, but I’ve read about how after a number of bites, some people stop reacting. Supposedly it’s like 10,000 bites, which I’m not up to and not even close to, but maybe I am actually developing some resistance. 🤞
Anyway, we bed down for the night at the campsite there after a decent drive across the pass and down–I having managed to get myself wide awake with the caffeine and sugar. I haven’t had caffeine in a while, so I think my body was pretty wired by it.
Oh! On the drive down, I noticed what I thought might be a good bridge to jump off of. we were out in what seems to be the middle of nowhere, and as we were driving across the bridge at dusk, I noticed that it looks like a pretty significant distance between the bridge and the water below, and it looked also to me like the water below might be deep.
😁
I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that it is what it looks like it might be. We’ve marked it on the map, and we’re going to go back and check it out before I head to the airport in a few days.
Love to all you wonderful people out there. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 