(written on February 19th and 20th from notes taken previously).
I was up late, but gratefully, undisturbed (other than a mosquito that had made its way inside my van somehow and gorged itself on me 🙃).
Despite being up late, today was definitely not just another uneventful day. 🙃
My big planned adventure was going back to Hokitika Gorge, one of my favorite places in all of New Zealand, a place that Chase and I visited I think at least three times on three separate days last time I was in the South Island.
It was one of our favorite places because of the stellar cliff jumping experience (or in this particular case, bridge jumping 🙃):
Intimidating thirteen-meter drop (42 feet).
Stunning electric blue/turquoise water.
And loads of highly entertained tourists excited to watch you jump. 🙃
Quite the recipe. 😆
The route I chose from my campsite to Hokitika Gorge was sort of s shaped, taking me from the east side of Lake Kaniere, all the way around the southern end of the lake heading back up northwest, loosely following the Kokatahi River, before crossing the river and heading southwest to the Gorge.
Snapping pictures, as per usual, along the way. ☺️
When I got to Hokitika Gorge, I found myself hesitant to just run on over and jump off the bridge. 🙃
Did I actually want to do it?
Could my back handle it?
I debated.
In the meantime, I spent some time engaged in my journal catch-up efforts. I used the bathroom. I chatted with a 20-something young man.
And continued my internal debate. 🙃
Eventually, I grabbed my day pack, filled it with supplies, including my wetsuit, and began the walk to the bridge (a short, maybe 1/2 kilometer? walk from my little secret parking spot to the jumping bridge).
When I got to the bridge, I was a bit disappointed because the water that had been a turquoise color so electric that it looked artificial was more of a pastel blue.
Certainly it was still beautiful, even stunning in its own way, especially for tourists who’d never seen anything different and were stunned by its color and beauty.
But I had a different picture in my head. 🙃
Still, it was beautiful, just… different.
And speaking of different, the bridge was different. And not just a little maintenance change either: It was a completely different bridge than it was three years ago. 😲
With this new bridge, there was no longer a max-load warning sign. Last time, Chase and I had to be careful to not be a nuisance to the other tourists spending so much time hanging out on the bridge while others waited for us to jump.
I forget how many people were allowed on the bridge at the same time last time, maybe something like 10 or 12?
I don’t remember.
There was also a change in the design. Last time perhaps every third or fourth cross brace (think railroad tie) was longer than the others, and it was one of those that we were jumping off of. Having that longer cross brace, when you climbed over the railing, there was a lot more wood to step on.
On this one, every cross brace was the same length, with none of them allowing for much of any standing room.
I think the cabling also played a big role in what made this bridge more challenging to jump from. On the last bridge, I think there was only one suspension cable on each side of the bridge. With this new bridge there were two cables on each side (probably the reason they were able to remove the load limit).
But now when climbing over the railing, you’d have to step on the two cables before being able to step on the tiny bit of wood that extended further than the cables, that little bit being barely big enough for two feet, and not even that large.
😅
To jump or not to jump. 🙃
I also couldn’t tell if the bridge was higher or lower or the same as before. I thought that maybe it was a little lower? But someone else said that it was higher. 🤷
I didn’t have any paracord with me like we did last time in order to measure the height.
Hmmm…
😅
What I did know was that the smartest thing to do was to verify water depth. Just because the water was deep enough last time doesn’t mean it’s going to be deep enough this time. Floods can change the location of sandbars (and there was a sandbar relatively near the bridge 3 years ago ), and they can also drag large debris, such as trees, down river.
Always recheck depth.
Assume nothing.
The best way to check the depth was to do exactly the same thing that Chase had done three years ago, float down the river from an easy access point, and then try to swim down as far as you could to see if you touch the bottom or any sort of obstacle.
That was the next rational step to take in the preparation process, so I walked across the bridge, down the path, through the little gate, and over to the river access area, where you can walk all the way down to the river itself and take a dip, or you can jump in the river from little mini cliffs above (the highest maybe six or seven meters above the water).
It wasn’t long before I jumped from the top into the frigid water below, once again, I think the only person in the water with long pants and long sleeves on. 🙃
I’ll probably get some of the chronology of the rest of the Hokitika Gorge experience wrong, as there was a whole lot of social interaction into moving back and forth between different areas of the river. 🙃
Anyway, before I jumped, I had seen that someone had lost their sun hat, and it had fallen down the cliff and gotten itself secured in a little ledge/notch in the rock out of the wind, so after my first jump, when I climbed back up the cliff from the water (not too challenging and allowing for much less time in the frigid water than having to swim all the way around to the water-level access point), I snagged the hat on the way up.
I think I’d jumped a couple times when people started being interested in joining me. With no one else jumping off the cliff into the water (possibly because none of the tourists there had ever seen it done before, so no one knew that it could safely be done?), once people saw someone jumping in, just like at Paines Ford, others started joining in.
Which is always fun. 🙃
It also wasn’t long before a super cute young married couple (I think she was 19 and he 21) came over, having heard the big splashes from somebody jumping off the cliff. 🙃
We started chatting when they came over (I forget what about) and ended up chatting for quite a long time.
Great people. 😊
We talked long enough that, without moving around, I started getting cold and shivering on the rock.
At least part of our conversation, we’d been talking about cliff jumping, and I had talked about potentially wanting to jump from the bridge, as I’d done years before.
And the young man was very encouraging, wanting to see me jump. 🙃
I hadn’t yet decided if I wanted to do that, but with his encouragement, I put on my wetsuit, I already cold, jumped off the cliff into the river, and started my float down.
I had expected, because the current is pretty strong right where you jump in, to be taken down river quite quickly, buuuuut that wasn’t the case. 🙃 After sort of sitting there for a little while feeling like I was barely moving at all, I started swimming toward the bridge down river to reduce both the wait time as well as the length of time I stayed in the frigid water.
Once finally underneath the bridge, I focused in on a particular spot on the bridge that I would remember once I was up on top, and then I did my best to check the water at the spot where I figured I’d land when jumping off.
What I didn’t think about until the moment that I was attempting to push myself below the water as far as possible was that having a wetsuit on made me a lot more buoyant than being without one. 😅
So it was quite a struggle to go down much of any distance at all, or at least so it felt.
Not the greatest circumstance when you’re trying to gauge depth in order to assure a safe jump. 🙃
I think I did at least a few depth tests, going down as far as I could get myself to go, before deciding that, should I decide to make the jump, that I was probably going to be safe.
So I swam over to the same exit point that Chase and I used a few years ago, a place where the super steep rock sort of flattens out a bit toward at river level, such that you can climb up on it and get out of the water.
From there, at least last time, we just sort of scrambled up the super steep bank the 40 or so vertical feet that it took to get back to bridge level.
It was a little technical and physically demanding, but not super difficult.
This time, my route up had been nearly completely blocked by a large pile of tree debris left over from the construction efforts for the bridge (if I haven’t mentioned it by now, when forestry work is done in New Zealand, they don’t burn the wood, turn it into wood chips, etc. Nothing like that, at least not that I’ve ever seen. Depending on the location, they either leave the vegetation where it fell, or they just pile the brush up into huge piles and leave it to decompose.
I’ve always assumed that given New Zealand’s efforts do as little damage to the environment as possible (although many unhappy residents openly debate that given the frequent use of deadly poisons to kill invasive species), that their reason for leaving all the tree leftovers was so as to significantly increase the amount of time that it took for the carbon in the plant matter to decompose and re-enter the atmosphere.
I have no idea if my assumption is correct. I’ve never checked it. Maybe I’ll do that right now… 🙃
Hmmm… a very quick search isn’t yielding a trustworthy answer. I don’t trust Google’s AI assistant enough to trust its answer, as it is quite frequently incorrect. 🙃
Anyway, unnecessary side tangent.
The point is that it made it super challenging to back up to bridge level. I had to take the time to shift some branches around and then be careful not to tear or poke holes in my wetsuit.
Eventually, I made it up and walked over to the middle of the bridge.
Aaaaaand, I didn’t jump right away. 🙃
I’m having a hard time remembering the exact order of events (which isn’t great for someone who wants everything accurate because inaccuracy feels like a type of dishonesty/deception, even if unintentional), but I think I was pretty cold after having spent so much time shivering on the shore and then floating down the freezing cold river.
So I want to say that I spent a good amount of time warming up on the bridge and chatting with other tourists before I finally jumped.
Which I think, unintentionally, served to build up a sense of anticipation in the tourists who weren’t in a hurry. 😆
So by the time I, without any announcement, suddenly started climbing over the railing, there were quite a few spectators hanging around waiting for me to finally jump. 🙃
If I remember correctly, there were some people still waiting for me to jump back on the cliffs by the riverside (the young couple was still there, I think), so I yelled over to them, letting them know I was about to jump (as they had wanted to be witness to it).
And then, with tourist phones out and ready to record, I decided to add just a little bit of intrigue/showmanship, I looked toward one of the cameras and said something to the effect of “If I die, tell my mom I love her.”
And I jumped.
Now when I jump from any other place–Kaiate Falls just outside of Tauranga, the cliffs next to Waitawheta Falls in the Karangahake Gorge area, even my beloved ledge at Paines Ford, there’s not a whole lot of time to think while you’re in the air after you jump. You jump, then you immediately focus on proper technique as you enter the water, and boom, it’s done, and you’re coming back to the surface.
The jump from this bridge, however, is high enough that there’s this little bit of extra time to actually look around and take in your surroundings and realize how far you’re falling before you have to think about your splash down technique.
I think that extra thinking time actually increases the butterflies flapping around during the whole experience. 🙃
One of the challenges that I had jumping from this bridge last time was that my technique managed to be bad on most of my jumps.
I kept putting my left arm out instinctively to catch myself, which caused me to slap down hard over and over and over. Over the following days after jumping, I had quite the large bruise on the inside of my left arm. 😆
I also struggled to keep from getting water up my nose, at one point having it shoot up so violently that when I came to the surface, I was disoriented enough that I was actually concerned that I could be in trouble.
I remember my sinuses being so full of water that if I bent over and blew my nose, after blowing my nose, I would have long streams of water just running out my nose.
Pretty nutty. 🙃
But this jump… was perfect. 🙏
Good jump, good form, good splash down… perfect.
🥳
Much to the delight of the crowd above. 😁
I do enjoy entertaining. 🙃
As I went to climb up the super steep bank for the second time, I noticed that someone had actually put a rope on the side of the bank that was closer to where I had jumped off the bridge, so traversed the a little bit back the way I had come but a little higher up, and then scrambled up to the rope and was able to make it back to the bridge quite easily that way.
So much better than having to fight that thicket of downed branches that I fought last time. 🙏
I had left my day pack with the young couple by the riverside cliffs when I jumped in to do my depth testing; and they told me they’d bring it over to me after I jumped. After I had jumped, climbed up, and walked back onto the bridge, they walked over and gave me my pack, which I then stashed underneath the near end of the bridge (the end closest to the parking area)
After walking back out to the middle of the bridge, dripping dry a little bit, I started chatting with a lady and her kids, as well as with another gentleman, both local New Zealanders, I believe?
We got to talking about beautiful places to visit around New Zealand, and having done a fair bit of traveling around this fabulous country, I talked about some of the places I’d been, making some recommendations and getting people’s WhatsApp info to send them directions and whatnot (didn’t have reception strong enough to show people).
A few more jumps, tourists coming and going and enjoying this spectacle.
As the day wore on, a gentleman with a couple of kids came by, and we were talking a fair bit. I spent a good amount of time teaching his kids about safety in doing the kinds of jumping that I was doing, depth checking even if you’ve been to that particular place before, not trusting a rope that someone else is put up until you’ve inspected it yourself, etc.
I love kids.
I think today hit me harder than most other days–my longing to be a dad and the loss I feel at the direction my life so unexpectedly went that had been sans companion and sans kids.
And how I feel old and tired, in my body is now to the point that I wouldn’t even be able to carry my own kids around. 😞
I don’t spend much time thinking about those things. No point.
But sometimes the reminders are hard.
The man’s little boy wanted to jump also, but I told him that before jumping from something high up like this, he needed to be completely comfortable jumping from a place that was lower down.
And even then, if he wasn’t confident in his ability to jump from higher up, then he shouldn’t.
The young boy (maybe 10?) wanting to jump in so badly, convinced the father to let them go back and get their wetsuits, and the father, who seemed like a super good guy, was all in.
He’s the kind of guy that I think I easily could have been friends with.
The little girl didn’t want to go back to the car but wanted to stay with me, but clearly, best not to teach a young child that it’s okay to hang around with strangers. 😅
I don’t know if they do The stranger danger thing in New Zealand like they do in the United States, but it’s a good policy to have.
The father and his kids were gone for a good little while, but I had told them I would wait for them, and eventually they came back.
They didn’t have their wetsuits on, but the young boy wanted to jump in nonetheless, so we walked over to the cliff area where I had started the day, and I jumped in first to give him a little encouragement.
I also showed him where to climb up to get out, so that he didn’t have to swim all the way around.
The young boy was nervous, but to his credit, he eventually made the jump!
He was also able to make the climb up the rock without any issue at all.
Over the next maybe hour or so (I’m totally just guessing), he jumped multiple times. I might have jumped maybe one more time?
While we were there, a couple of probably mid-twenties women came over, interested in the possibility of jumping in, having thought they weren’t allowed. But knowing that they could, they walked all the way back to their car, got their swimsuits on, and came back.
By that time the kids had gotten back from their car to start jumping, the sun had gone far enough down that it was behind the hills, so the entire river was in the shade, making a little harder to stay warm.
It also meant the sand flies were coming out in force. 😅
The Father’s little girl, not wearing long pants and long sleeves started trying to curl her body up inside her clothes to stop the sand flies.
Boy do I know the feeling. 😆
The two women also jumped in, I think just once, but thoroughly enjoying themselves.
Eventually, I bid farewell to everybody, the father and his kids walking back across the bridge and to their car, and the two young ladies finishing the loop after asking me whether or not I thought it was worth it to walk the whole loop (I think my reply was something like, ‘when I have the opportunity to see something new or go back the way I came, I generally like to see what’s new, even if it’s not terribly exciting.’
And they headed off to finish the loop.
Having already walked the loop myself, I just walked back to my van the same way I had come in. 🙃
On the way back to my van, I started sending my traveling recommendations out via WhatsApp to all the people who had requested them.
After getting back to my van, I used the bathroom, and as I was passing a group of Chinese people who were afraid of the weka bird, I let them know they were in absolutely no danger, so they relaxed as it wandered near them.
In fact, it might have been the same weka that came down to my van that I gave a little bit of food to. 🙃
Great day. 😊
But it wasn’t over yet. 🙃
I wasn’t quite sure where I wanted to go, but I headed back toward town, getting gas, and then I think I started to drive north before remembering that there was a glow worm place right there in the town of Hokitika.
I figured it probably wasn’t going to be anything super amazing, as it was right there in town and free, but I figured what the heck, I might as well just hang out and wait for nightfall and then give it a look, so I turned around and drove back and parked in the parking lot right next to the walkway up to Glow Worm Dell.
As I was sitting in my car, I think binge watching some TV show or another, I noticed two girls walking over who were about to walk up the path to see the glow worms.
But there was a problem.
It was still mostly light outside. Ain’t gonna see nothin’ when it’s light outside.
We ended up chatting for probably a good 45 minutes or so, pausing our conversation at one point to take pictures of the gorgeous sunset, and then continuing to chat a bit until I went back to my van.
At dusk, lots of people started arriving, and eventually, the girls walked down the path, joining lots of others, even though it wasn’t fully dark yet.
By the time they came out, though, it was pretty dark out there, and when I saw them come out, I asked him how it was, and they’d had a great time. So that was good.
For me, though, even though it was mostly dark, I wanted to wait for it to be completely dark, and I was also not so enthusiastic about the number of people there, so I continued waiting.
At some point in time, a group of 30 to 40 something looking men came out after enjoying their trip to the glowworms. I don’t remember how we got started talking, but I started chatting with them, and we ended up chatting for probably a good 45 minutes, maybe longer.
They were Danish, and I got the conversation started with quite the laugh when the first thing that came out of my mouth after I heard they were Danish was a huge apology for the rhetoric my president was spewing about taking over Greenland. 😅
I think I mentioned to them that I was pretty confident that Trump was all talk and would never follow through on any kind of actual force in taking Greenland–he just runs his mouth and uses hyperbole and threat in order to scare people into getting his hidden objective.
The problem for me in this particular case was that, even though I was pretty confident it was just his normal “Art of the Deal” strategy on fold display for the world stage, threatening to take over a sovereign nation’s territory is so far beyond that it’s not even something that’s acceptable as a strategy to get what you want, even if you have zero intent on following through with it.
You just don’t do that. How can any nation ever trust you again?
We’re supposed to be the United States, the good guys, the ones who guard and protect freedom.
Being unwilling to rule out force, and then threatening tariffs if we don’t get what we want…
Even if that’s not the actual end goal, which I didn’t think it was… It’s still just so far beyond the pale.
End rant.
We talked and talked and talked, and laughed and joked. I guess they were there with their elderly parents, doing a bit of traveling with them and looking for places they could take physically-limited older people.
I said I would think about and send them suggestions for places they might be able to go, but boy that’s a hard thing when most of the places I go are challenging for physically-limited older people.
After a good little while, including their being nervous to ask but eventually asking me if I knew where they could get some weed 😆 (I suggested the most likely source would be going to places where 20 somethings congregate for adventures, like rock climbing cliffs and what not), we bid each other farewell, and I, now the only person left at the Glow Worm Dell, started walking up the path to see what kind of an experience it was going to be.
And oh wow.
I never expected…
Wow. 😮
Similar to those two places out in the middle of nowhere southeast of Tongariro, this place was just beautiful.
I wouldn’t put it quite as high as those two places in the North Island, but boy was it amazing. 😁
The walk was maybe 100 meters up to a dead end with railings that had you inside this little mini slot Canyon, the walls covered in glow worms.
And I with that wide, childlike smile of delight and awe plastered on my face. 😁
I had waited hours just to see if it was worth waiting for, and boy was it ever. 🙏
It’s hard to leave places like that. It’s also hard to be there alone without someone special to share it with.
But eventually I made my way down the path, just as an elderly couple was walking up the path.
I remembered there were also glow worm viewing places along the route to the lake that I had stayed at the other night (Lake Brunner), so I looked those up on my map and decided to make the night a glow worm night. 🙃
It was already late, and in order to enjoy most glow worm experiences, it’s got to be well after sunset, once the night sky is dark dark.
So the lack of sleep would happen anyway, and these stops were on the way back to Lake Brunner, so… it seemed only reasonable.
The second glowworm stop for the night was in the town of Kumara. In the reviews of the place, people had explained how to get there, but it was still quite confusing to me.
It was late at night, of course, and the route that you needed to take had you first parking in sort of suspicious looking spot and then walking a gravel path right next to people’s homes.
Not the best optics. 😅
Still, I went for it anyway, trying to be as quiet as possible as the gravel crunched beneath my feet as I walked the path to one side of a house.
I followed the path around into the bush, and eventually started seeing little glow worms amidst the plants.
I kept going, and came to a spot where there were three little caves that looked like they were test shafts for mining?
They didn’t go back very far, maybe 10 or 20 meters? I don’t remember anymore.
But there were a handful of glow worms on the low ceilings of the little tunnels/caves/shafts.
After seeing what I had seen just a short while ago, this was just kind of a ‘oh, nice’ experience and not a ‘wow’ experience as the other had been.
Still, it was fun to be there and get a sense of what’s out there and available for people to see.
I’ve been giving Google reviews of different places that I visited, and so I think maybe there’s a part of me that’s starting to feel like a tour guide, wanting to be able to give people a good understanding of what’s available, so going to these kinds of places feels a little bit like it’s serving multiple purposes. 🙃
The third and final glow-worm experience for the night was a place called Tunnel Terrace Walk.
Had I realized that I was going to turn the night into a glow-worm extravaganza, I would have done my stops in a different order, as going to the Tunnel Terrace Walk meant backtracking along a road that I could have taken as a shortcut from Hokitika to the glow worm location in Kumara.
Instead, having not planned this out in advance, I ended up backtracking south through the middle of nowhere.
And it was getting late. 🙃
I had visited Kumara somewhere around 1:00 a.m., and it was probably around 1:30 when I got to the Tunnel Terrace Walk.
But the Tunnel Terrace Walk was… confusing.
At first, I couldn’t find the entrance. One of the signs made it sound like one of the tunnels was closed, and I had to walk up the road multiple kilometers after parking my car at the car park just to be able to enter the walk.
😶
I wasn’t feeling that. 🙃 Not at the end of a long day like today. 😅
I ended up driving my van down the road looking for the other entrance, and then parking my van in the grass on the side of the road. I then actually left my van running, my phone inside because I’ve learned to this point that phones are pretty much useless when it comes to trying to take pictures of glow worms in the dark.
Leaving my phone would come back to haunt me, though. 😅
As I began the walk, the first portion of it went through a natural tunnel in the rock. I then followed the path around through the bush to a place where a slip had taken out the trail. It just so happened to be that right at that point there were a whole bunch of glow worms in the vegetation on the little hill above the path right before the destruction, so that was pretty. 😊
But there were still two more tunnels to explore, and I didn’t want to leave the place, having taken the effort to figure out how to get there, without experiencing the rest of the walk. 🙃
So on I went, deeper and deeper into the bush, downhills, then uphills, to my right, to my left. With all the ups and downs and winding around, I got completely disoriented.
And having left my phone in the van, I had no way of knowing where I actually was. 😬 There hadn’t been any signs saying how long the walk actually was, so I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
Should I go back? Should I keep going?
I did find the second tunnel, and followed it all the way to its end and back, probably a good 50 to 100 meters, m seeing some glow worms along the way, and trying to avoid getting my feet too wet in the water that ran through the tunnel.
As I continued onward, I was getting pretty nervous. I’d been out there walking for a good long time and felt like I was getting further and further away from the road.
Eventually, I came to the third tunnel, one that had actually been closed because of a rockfall, I think?
I ended up going through the tunnel anyway, as I knew that coming out the other side would put me on the right path, so that’s what I did.
To my surprise and great relief, it wasn’t long from that point before I found myself back on the road.
🙏
I was a fair bit further back from where my van was parked (and still running if it hadn’t been stolen 😅), but it was then that I realized how completely disoriented I had become, as I had thought I was walking the opposite direction from where I actually ended up. 🙃
Gratefully, though it was a fair jaunt along the road from where I had come out of the bush back to my van, my van was still there and still running. 🙏
Filled with relief, and also ready to be done with the day, I drove from there all the way back to the lovely little freedom camping spot at Lake Brunner.
Though admittedly I wasn’t 100% confident that I had seen all of the glow worm spots in that area, so I kept my eye out as I was driving away from the tunnel walk area to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I think part of me didn’t want there to be anything else, but another part of me didn’t want to miss anything if I’d already gone to the efforts that I had gone to.
As glow worm experiences go, I would classify that third location as just sort of a “nice” place.
It was a pretty little walk that was only nerve-wracking because I had no idea where I was or how far I had to go, as I didn’t have my phone with me to be able to see a map.
But outside of that, the little tunnels were fun, and it’s always fun to see glow worms, and it was just a nice walk.
But it was time to be done for the day, and I was grateful to roll into my little parking area by the lake–this time with fellow campers parked on the grass in the field in front of me.
What. A. Day! 🙃
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 