(written on February 21st from notes taken previously).
Wow, there were lots of trains last night. Never would have guessed. 🙃
My morning was a little bit of a repeat from yesterday. After getting up for the last time, I drove all the way back to the little dirt turnaround/parking area next to Peg Leg Creek, but with the rain, I once again just sat there sort of veging out waiting out the storm.
And eating.
I can’t. Stop. Eating. 😅
I think I might be the fattest I’ve ever been. 😬
I don’t have a scale to jump on to tell for sure, but I’ve certainly gained a lot of weight since I’ve been in New Zealand.
Couldn’t have anything to do with all the junk food I eat pretty much all day everyday. 😅
Of course not. 🙃
After the rain let up, I decided to go ahead and attempt my river walk to the falls. 🥾
The beginning of the walk was pretty much exactly as I remember, needing to cross the river that had multiple channels at that point.
But the rest of the rock-hopping scramble was harder than I remember it being. Maybe it’s because there was more water this time from the rain?
There were several challenging spots to fight through, nothing super duper sketchy, but definitely some pretty good challenges.
And a 0% chance of being able to do the walk without having to walk through the river several different occasions.
Well, unless you wanted to bush bash along the side of mountain next to the river through the thick underbrush. 😅
I tried to take pictures here and there, but something has happened with my phone ‘s camera software such that it darkens up the pictures after I’ve taken them.
What I see on the screen before I take the picture is no longer what I see once I go back and look at the picture after it’s been taken.
The final capture is significantly darker, making everything harder to see, and completely changing the captured view from the actual experience of the place.
Not only that, but when I use the shadow adjusting tool in the camera software, once I’ve used it, I can’t use it or the brightness adjustment feature until I’ve completely closed the app and reopened it. 😒
Really starting to get frustrated with this stupid phone. They’re Google. They’re software geniuses.
It’s one of my biggest pet peeves that enormously wealthy companies do half-assed jobs on the products their customers use all the time.
Having worked in a company for years with a developer, I know full well that making the little changes, at least in most cases, is really not a big deal at all.
Take Amazon Prime’s Media player. It feels like something from 20 years ago. There’s no way to set videos to play faster or slower, end the spot on the screen that you have to tap to fast forward or rewind videos is so tiny that I can sit there with my finger tapping on the same spot on the screen to try and fast forward or rewind and still have multiple taps that don’t hit their tiny button.
It’s rather aggravating.
But I guess that’s why there’s that saying that there’s always room at the top. There’s always room for a better product, and that’s what allows the Blackberries, Nokias, and Blockbusters of the world to crash down to earth when others arise to make a better product.
And the software issues my phone is having with the camera right now… Clearly they’re caused by an update, as the phone never used to have those problems before. So the code was correct once, shouldn’t be that big of a deal to go fix it. There was nothing wrong with the camera before, so just whatever you did, undo it until you can figure out what on earth you did to screw things up.
Or is it just the ploy to get customers to buy new phones?
If that’s the case, they’ve probably lost a customer in me, as I don’t want to risk spending a whole bunch of money on a top-tier phone with this kind of potential garbage to deal with down the road.
End soap box rant. 😅
So it was a frustrating challenge taking pictures, as I kept having to close and reopen the app to adjust the shadow every single time I wanted to take pictures and not have them show up darker afterward.
But it was exciting and fun for me to find that my experience hiking to the falls was pretty much identical to what I had remembered and to the stories I had told people.
Sometimes memories are quite faulty, but in this particular case, I was right on.
Specifically, one of the ways that I tell the story of the hike to that falls is that as we were climbing up the canyon, we could see mist in the distance, so we knew there was a waterfall, but we couldn’t see the Falls itself.
And even as we got closer and closer, still, we couldn’t see any waterfall.
Finally, no more than 30 meters away from the falls, still there was nothing–nothing!
Standing there, staring at the end of the canyon, just a stone’s throw away… still… The only evidence of the existence of a waterfall was the mist in the air and now the thunder of the falls as it splashed down to create that mist.
But still no view of the falls.
Oh how I was pleased to find that description of the experience to be as accurate now as it was then (though I think the cloud cover kept me from seeing the mist this time?).
It wasn’t until I was perhaps 20 meters away from the splashdown point of the waterfall itself that I caught my first glimpses of the waterfall.
So. Cool!
You rock hop and scramble your way up this frothy river through a narrow winding canyon with steep mountain hills on each side of you, and then you come to the end, as if walking through a v-shaped hallway in your home with no roof and coming to the end. The waterfall should be pouring down right in front of you because you’re in this narrow canyon.
You should see it. How could you not see it? How could the water flow anywhere but straight over the edge of the drop off you see in front of you and then down to where you’re standing?
But nope!
It deceives you! Instead of coming down the drop off in front of you, the drop off isn’t where you’d expect when looking from above, and so the river above actually cuts to the side, going along the side of the sheer cliffs.
But then something happens that completes the deception: That river that has cut to the side of the drop off, hits a wall of rock, and makes a 90° turn before crashing down into its splash pool below still behind the wall of rock that extends itself outward from the cliff side, but only on the one side of the falls.
It’s as if the waterfall desperately doesn’t want to be seen, so it veils its face from any onlookers down river.
😊
The experience was exactly as I remember it, if not even more amazing–at least in the placement of the falls and the experience leading up to finally seeing them.
With all the rain, unfortunately, the water wasn’t the brilliant turquoise that it was when Chase and I had visited there on a dry summer day.
That was definitely disappointing, as was the significant challenge that I ran into trying to duplicate the picture I had taken last time, a picture that has remained my lock screen picture on my phone perhaps the entirety of the last three years since my last visit to New Zealand. 🙃
It’s only just now as I write this that I’m remembering that I must have taken that picture with my backup phone, as the Pixel 7 Pro I was using at the time had gotten smashed weeks before.
That probably explains why I struggled so much to get the same frame. I was hoping to exactly duplicate the picture. I tried so many different vantage points and so many different zoom options, but never could get it exactly the same as last time.
I think now I know why. 🙃
Oh well, I tried.
On the walk back, I snapped some more pictures as the sun shone through a little bit.
I found a dead baby goat hanging from a branch that must have gotten caught in the branch and swept down river during a recent super-high-water event.
Sad… and sobering.
Once back to my van after reverse rock hopping and scrambling down the river, I found my van was dead.
I must have drained the battery down more than I thought before leaving? or maybe I did something after getting back that drained it down that I don’t remember?
Whatever the cause, I was stuck right there in that dirt parking lot that no one has a reason to go to because there’s seemingly nothing there, which made the likelihood of someone stopping in at random who would be able to give me a jump, pretty small.
If I’m remembering correctly, it also left my windows partially down, and it had started to sprinkle down rain a little bit again. 😅
The only reasonable option for getting assistance in a timely manner seems to be to try and flag someone down off of the main road.
Gratefully, I didn’t have to wait too long before I was able to flag down a van full of I think Chinese people? Who, gratefully, knew that their battery was in the very back of their van, so they backed up to me, and I was able to get myself jumped off.
Thx, Chinese family. 🙏
After leaving the little dirt car park area, I decided to head back down the canyon (toward where I had originally come from yesterday morning) to see some majestic waterfalls I’d seen on the way in but hadn’t gotten pictures of.
There wasn’t a shoulder to pull over on, but after going down the canyon a bit and then turning around to head back up, I found myself stuck in traffic behind a truck crawling up the steep canyon road at a snail’s pace, which enabled me to snap at least a couple pictures. 🙃
Once safely past the snails, I headed back toward Arthur’s Village, availing myself of the bathroom at the train station and then stopping off at the recycling bins again to recycle a few newly-empty food containers.
By that time, it was already late in the day again, so I headed back to the same spot by the trains yesterday, although parking in a different portion of the dirt turnaround area, this time on the near side of the tracks.
Spent a good little bit of time veging out and continuing to follow all of the Greenland stuff before crashing for the night.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 