(written on December 8th and 18th from notes taken previously)
I was slow getting going this morning, just hanging out in my van for a good little while.
After I finally got up and going, I hung out with the Belgian family for a bit, helping them get their roof top tent stowed away properly.
Spent some more time just chilling in my van before following the Belgian family into the caves, again loaning my headlamp to Joelle and acting as a bit of a tour guide. 🙃
Being the cave guide turned out to be a positive, gratefully. I had worried a little bit that maybe I was annoying, showing them around, but I guess it turned out that Joelle, who came with us all the way to the very end of the cave 🎉, would not have come anywhere near that far had I not been there as someone who knew the cave already (she was leery, having fallen and gotten a bad concussion in a previous caving trip, I think it was?)
Definitely slippery in plenty of places in this and many caves. Better to be concerned and careful than to be reckless.
Got some pictures for them inside the cave and was lucky enough to be taking a video without them knowing when an eel swam up against Joelle’s leg.
Perfect timing. Fun. 🥳
After leaving the cave and going back to the parking lot, I spent some time hanging out at my van. A couple of ladies who are parked in a Mercedes next to me called my attention to some trash that I guess had fallen out of my van and started blowing away.
I was a little embarrassed, as I’m usually the guy who is picking up the trash, and here I was worried that they were thinking that I might be one a litterer.
Good reminder that most likely a sizable portion of litter is simply innocent, not knowing that something has fallen and blown away from you or fallen at just the wrong time as you’re closing a door and driving away or something. And another good reason to be picking up litter, both because a sizable portion of it is innocent and also to make each place more beautiful for the next people who come along.
Certainly, clearly, there’s plenty of purposeful litter, mostly alcohol bottles and beer cans chucked into the vegetation, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of that is from teenagers trying to hide what they are doing.
Let’s see… got in touch with my spelunking contact from 3 years ago that pointed Chase and I to Gardeners Gut, a fun cave we spent some hours in back in ’22. She invited me to help her do some cave mapping. There are something like 12 km of mapped cave, much more than Chase and I explored. He and I went as far as finding an underground waterfall that I remember climbing either behind or up and over in order to not get absolutely drenched (normally, I don’t mind being wet, but we were also underground where it was cold, so I didn’t want to be super cold for the walk back.
One of the ladies next to me who pointed out my inadvertent wandering rubbish asked if I had ever been to Piroa Falls. I hadn’t, and she suggested it was a good visit, so after saying goodbye to the Belgian family, I headed that way.
And I loved it. 😊
Clearly, it wasn’t anything hugely spectacular, and the pictures don’t do it justice, but it was a beautiful little waterfall and swimming hole with a spot that was deep enough to go cliff jumping, I think, though I didn’t try.
I did spend some good time swimming and jumping off the shore rocks.
Chatted with a couple of department of conservation workers who I think were cutting up a fallen tree? They had a chainsaw, and the guy was chopping sections up and checking them up the bank to a young woman who was dragging them away.
Fun little place. 😊
From there, I headed over to the east coast of northland, northeast of Auckland, thinking that I would stay at Matheson Bay.
I failed, however, to look up to check to see if I was allowed to stay there before driving all the way there. 😅
I wasn’t. 🙃
Long drive just to have to find another place. 😅
So I looked on my CamperMate app and found some places that I was allowed to stay at and started driving south, sort of hugging the coast until I got to Hatfield Beach Reserve and crashed for the night.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 