(written on the 25th from notes taken yesterday! 🥳)
I was up early, unable to fall asleep after waking up, because I was anxious enough about where I was sleeping and about the issues with the Yasaway Flyer ticket fiasco that my body was a tad juiced on whatever chemicals got cooked up.
So I rolled away early and continued my drive east through the mountain pass.
Beautiful area.
As I drove along, I passed some kind of big event just starting to get underway, by the looks of it. Out in the middle of nowhere in the past, there were banners up advertising some outdoor company, and campers and SUVs, loads of vehicles pulling up and parking in a very large field.
Curious if there was anything interesting, I did a u-turn and came back around to get a better view of which company was sponsoring the event.
When I saw a very large group of runners jogging off, I lost interest. 😅
Just the drive was beautiful, though, the contrasts with clouds and early sun on the mountains and hills and rivers.
I love New Zealand.
Maybe I’ll make living in New Zealand a yearly thing… Spend half my time here and half my time back home.
Don’t want to be so far away from family and friends, but I live so far away from my close friends that I guess it’s not really much different.
Moving on…
I stopped here and there to snap some pictures, including at Castle Hill, a place I visited with Chase last time I was here. I didn’t stay long, just snap some pictures from the parking lot because of the beauty of the way the morning light showing down on the rock formations.
Thinking that I remembered that Chase and I spent Christmas morning near here, I was on the lookout for that area, as I wanted to stop by again to take some pictures… A little bit of auld lang zine (spelling? I’m in the middle of nowhere and can’t check spelling 🙃).
It wasn’t but a few minutes before I arrived at our Christmas spot, staying to take pictures and pick up some trash.
I spent a little while trying to figure out where I wanted to go next. My plain leaves in a couple of days, but what do I do between now and then?
Given the issues that I had with my purchase of the Yasawa Islands Bula Pass, it wasn’t going to be prudent to drive off into the hill somewhere that might find me without internet connection.
I did go at least a little bit in that direction, though. 🙃
I hung out for just a little while at Lake Lyndon, took some pictures, used the long drop, veged out a little bit and spent more time trying to figure out where I was going in what I was doing.
Looking at the map, I decided to take the dirt road that went alongside the lake toward another lake (Lake Coleridge).
I stopped her pictures here and there, enjoying the scenery–the mountains, the streams and rivers, the waterfalls, The wildflowers that are absolutely everywhere…
It’s so interesting to me how different the experiences of the place can be, wet weather vs dry, cloudy vs sunny, day vs night, above, below, from this side and that…
My first experience with Paines Ford 3 years ago was so memorable… It was a rainy day, with nobody there, and the rain made the colors in all the stones just pop! It was a wonderful visual feast. I don’t think I had ever seen such a colorful array of rocks anywhere in my entire life.
And it was a fun place to swim and take a little bath.
But this time, it was sunny and dry, and all those colorful rocks that were so mesmerizing?
Now they were all just shades of gray.
Nothing special.
Nothing at all like the experience that I had before.
I think we humans are the same way.
But this experience of Paines Ford, weeks ago at this point, turned it from a nice place to swim with beautifully-colored rocks, to one of my favorite places in all of New Zealand–despite the disappointing experience of the homogeneously colored rocks.
There was cliff jumping and rope swinging and deep-water bouldering, and wonderful people from all over the world; and the view from above was just… picturesque–the braided river and its color and its clarity, the trees… and hills in the distance. And being able to sit there on this skinny rock outcropping 30+ feet above the water, as of sitting on the end of a wooden plank, jutting out from but fixed perpendicular to the cliff… legs dangling…
It was magic.
A different magic than that other magical day in the same place.
The difference? It was sunny today, and someone had put up some rope swings that got me thinking. 🤔
Anyway, where was I? 🙃
I continued to take pictures of beautiful landscapes as I drove, turning south towards civilization near the southern end of Lake Coleridge because I needed to have internet signal to deal with the ticket fiasco.
From there, I definitely knew my next destination–Rakaia Gorge. That was the location of the last significant adventure that Chase and I had before I left New Zealand last time–jumping off the roughly 13-meter-above-the-water bridge into the bright turquoise water below.
The water wasn’t turquoise today, having rained so much over the last few days. Whenever it rains, the bright turquoise water turns a sort of silvery gray with just hints of turquoise in it.
I wasn’t quite in the mood to verify water depth and jump from the bridge today, so I mostly just poked around, snapping a few pictures of the bridge and the water below.
I hadn’t yet heard back from the Yasawa Flyer ticket people, but gratefully, they have WhatsApp as one of the options for communication, so I was able to call their customer service line through WhatsApp, and the lady I spoke with said she was actually in the middle of an email responding to my email from yesterday.
Gratefully, they switched the dates, so that the 27th is my first day on the boat. 🙏
I went for a walk on a trail that parallels the river for a long ways. I probably only went a kilometer or so up the trail, snapping pictures here and there, before heading back.
Since I wasn’t quite in the mood to test the water and do some cliff jumping, nor was there much on the list of places to visit nearby, I decided to work on my van a little bit.
I put the relay back in that I had removed my first week with the van. Then I decided to see if I could figure out my transmission issue.
I wiggled the connector for the neutral safety switch. I reconnected the stereo. I pulled several dash panels off to check underneath to see what I could find, but in the end, the result was a badly drained battery because I forgot that I had turned my headlights on to check the PRNDL status. Being daytime, and the vehicle not having a warning to let you know that your headlights are still on when the car is off, I totally spaced it.
Gratefully, once again 😆, I was able to get my vehicle jump started from someone who had parked next to me.
Where to go? The question of the day. 🙃
I scoured Google Maps trying to find somewhere that might be interesting, but the overwhelming majority of the land east of the mountains is just farmland.
There was a nearby waterfall, but when I got there, I realized it was on private land, and they charged a fee to go to the waterfall.
Having seen dozens of waterfalls in New Zealand, I didn’t feel the need to pay to go see this one. 🙃
Eventually, I gave up on trying to find any other cool place. I did want to go see Edoras (Rohan 🙃), but that was quite a ways away, and I didn’t want to waste the gas going all the way out there just to come right back when I’ll go that way again when I get back from Fiji.
I did need gas, though, so I drove to the nearest town big enough to have a gas station, bought gas, grabbed some quick stuff from the grocery store, and then sat yet again in my van trying to figure out where to go next. 😆
Eventually, I settled on going right back up into the mountains where I had been this morning, this time going on the road that I had stayed away from because I was concerned about reception while needing to get the Yasawa Flyer ticket stuff squared away.
The drive was beautiful. Mountains and rivers and streams, oh my. 🙃
I snapped a fair number of pictures, stopping in a whole bundle of places, before managing to find the hard-to-find Harper Campsite just north of Lake Coleridge.
It was still a bit light outside, but I just kicked it in my van the rest of the night veging out watching Bosch, and… grateful for the bug screens on my windows. 🙃
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 