(written on the 9th!)
I actually slept in a fair bit today. I don’t think I got up until after 9:00, which is pretty amazing for me.
Now I just have to figure out how to get myself to go to bed at a decent hour. 🙃
I was out quickly after getting up. Didn’t stick around to do anything at all at the spot there.
As it was still relatively early, I thought it was probably a good time to head into town and fill my water bottles (there is a drinking fountain/bottle filling dealie at a playground in town).
So I went and filled up all my water bottles (a bunch of them) and then headed back to the ocean to try and do some snorkeling in the super duper clear, turquoise water; buuuuuuuut, it was low tide again. 🙃
The ocean floor by the coast in this area slopes so gradually that when the tide is low, it exposes the ocean floor perhaps hundreds of meters out from the high tide mark.
Looking at the tide chart, it looks like the difference between low and high tide today with something like four meters.
I don’t know my tides very well, but that seemed to me like a pretty significant difference!
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that tides can be radically different in different parts of the world, with some barely changing it all and some changing several meters.
Ok, yeah, just checked… the French Mediterranean Coast apparently has swings of only about 40 cm, and the Bay of Fundy in Canada has swings of up to 53 feet. 😲
So anyway, it was low tide, with massive sections of exposed sand and rock, mostly sand. Generally, I like to snorkel around rocks, as they provide protection for the sea creatures from predators, which makes it more likely for me to find creatures to observe. At low tide, all the rocks are completely exposed pretty much down to the sand, so it wasn’t worth giving it a try, and I didn’t want to pay for the tourist trip out to Tonga Island (not the country) where they’re supposed to be super great snorkeling, as I’m going to Fiji in just a couple of weeks. 🙃
Still wanting to snorkel, I figured maybe I would do some exploring around the Eastern portion of the coast on the east side of Abel Tasman national Park. As I drove, I came to fork in the road, and where I had intended to go was to the right, but I wondered where the road to the left went, so I headed down the road.
The uphill side of the road was often marked by cliffs, which I’m guessing were made of sandstone or mudstone because sadly, people had been carving graffiti into them, and had been doing so for years. 😕
Wish I had some kind of a scraper to go and scrape off all the names and phrases and obscene things that are carved in.
Would probably take days to clean it all off. 😕
Maybe weeks. 😞
Anyway, I followed that road all the way down to the ocean only to realize that it was a place Chase and I had gone to when we were here a few years ago. 🙃
People often rave about Abel Tasman National Park, but I wonder how much of that is just hype from lack of exploration? I’ve had the privilege of exploring a massive chunk of New Zealand, and Abel Tasman is beautiful, but it’s… almost kind of ho hum compared to other places in New Zealand? I guess what I’m saying is that because it’s a national park, maybe when people have time to get away, they go to the national parks because they’re national parks, and they love them, because they definitely are places that are well deserved to be loved, but because they haven’t explored other places, these places get hyped up simply because of a lack of broader experience; whereas, for those of us who have had the privilege of traveling all around New Zealand, it feels like there are Abel Tasmans in lots of places?
Anyway, it is beautiful, for sure. Just, having traveled through the rest of New Zealand, I don’t quite understand the hype?
And having explored this area to my satisfaction previously with chase, I didn’t stop but turned around and headed back up the dirt road and over toward where I had originally intended to go–to the Awaroa Inlet.
I thought that maybe by the time I got there, the tide would have come back in at least enough to go do some exploratory snorkeling, and even more likely when I had to stop because of an unhappy noise the vehicle is making that sounded like a bad right front wheel bearing. Gratefully, it turned out to just be that the splash shield was rubbing against the tire when I turn the wheel. 🙃
When I got to the ocean again, there was no such luck with the tide having come up enough to do merit trying a little snorkel adventure.
There was a bit of luck in that I didn’t get myself stuck on the beach when I decided to drive down a dirt road that I didn’t know where went only to find that at the bottom of the dirt road was the beach; and it was a steep dirt road with no turnaround at the bottom other than to drive in the sand a bit–in my two-wheel drive minivan. 😅
Gratefully, I managed to get out, making as tight of a seven-point turn, or however many points it was, as I possibly could in order to avoid driving any further out onto the sand. The tires just spun and couldn’t grip on my first attempt up, so I backed up just a little bit, got a little bit more of a running start, and was able to make it up, the tire spinning a few times but gripping just enough to get me up.
That could have been… interesting. 😅
I headed back to Wainui Beach to wait for the tide to come in, watching for sand bars to be overtaken by ocean water. Eventually, all the sand bars were covered, and the crystal clear water was beckoning, so I put on my wetsuit and grabbed my mask and snorkel.
I did wonder if there even would be fish to see, there weren’t any fish visible from above looking down into the water, and I wondered how excited fish would be to even spend time in an area where they would have to go in and out at different times of the day.
I figured it might be a lost cause, and after snorkeling for probably 20 or 30 minutes and not seeing a single living creature, I figured I was right. Still, it was beautiful. I also realized that it wasn’t so much that the water was clearer than other places that I’ve snorkeled, just shallower with a Sandy bottom instead of the rocky areas that I had snorkeled in the past. In other places, it had gotten deep quickly.
On the way back from a large rock out cropping that I had hoped might be home to a bunch of fish but wasn’t, I found myself in the midst of a very large school of small fish, all the same species. They were super light colored species with some spots and stripes, but everything almost in light colored pastels maybe? such that they blended in fairly decently amidst the backdrop of the water and ocean floor.
I swam amidst them for a little while enjoying their presents, they seemingly unconcerned about mine.
Love spending time with this world’s creatures, ever since I was a little kid, I’ve loved being out in nature and with wildlife.
There are exceptions, of course. Mosquitoes, ticks, chiggers, sand flies… they can all… die. 😅
As it was getting toward later afternoon, I decided to head back to Paines Ford for maybe one last day of jumping and swimming and climbing.
There were fewer adventurers today and more families with little kids, at least at first.
A bit later, there were more adventurers coming over–rock climbers who had finished sport climbing for the day and were coming over to enjoy the swinging, jumping, swimming, and deep-water bouldering action.
As with the last couple of days, I did a little jumping. I helped some people with the rope swing. I tried the acid test route again, making it only as far as I did last time before giving up and dropping into the water because I have neither the skill nor the finger strength to continue with the available holds (they get progressively more challenging as you go along the route).
I finally tried the traverse route today, having seen several climbers doing it over the last few days. Without any help, I failed miserably, unable to find my way around a particular section of the wall. With the help of someone who knew the wall, I was able to get past the hard section I couldn’t do on my own and all the way to a place where, close to the end of the route, I just didn’t have the finger strength to grip the holds necessary to be able to continue.
I spent some time just hanging out and chatting with some climbers, and then I bid them farewell, planning to head north up toward Cape Farewell.
As I was on my way, I remembered, just as the turn off was coming up, that I was going to swing by and take a look at Te Waikoropupu Springs, so when I realized I hadn’t passed it and was literally coming up on the turn off, I hopped off the main road and headed toward the springs.
On my way, I noticed a very unkempt dirt road heading into the bush and thought it might be a good place to stay the night, so I started heading down it, and it got super super narrow with bushes scratching the side of the van on both sides. 😅
I totally spaced that I had screen windows. 😬
Really wasn’t looking forward to having to make those all over again, as that took… so long.
Gratefully, somehow the screen’s survived the onslaught of hundreds of meters worth of brush scraping against them. 😲🙏
They survived both down the road and back, as I stopped going down when it dawned on me that the screens were there and taking a beating.
The springs were pretty impressive.
I would guess the water depth where the springs were bubbling out was maybe 4 meters? And the force of the water bubbling up from the bottom was enough that you could see it at the surface.
The sun was already down by that point, so you couldn’t see the bright colors very well of the crystal clear springs where they bubble up, but it was a pretty significant amount of water bubbling up, enough to make a full-blown river.
I headed back to the beginning part of that unmaintained side road where I scraped the van sides pretty good to stay the night. I’ll go back to the spring in the morning when the sun is up and shining down on the spring itself.
Then it was a little bit of veging and then bed.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 