Road Trip
Invercargill - Banks Peninsula
I have a week to make it up the South Island. I have a car full of my first load of belongings being shifted north. I have three places in the South I want to see this winter for the first time: Banks Peninsula, Farewell Spit, and the Maniototo. This drive would invest in Banks and say hallo to Farewell.
The first day was the somewhat mundane but still pleasant drive up to Dunedin where I stopped in to see a friend then spent the night at a beach just past Palmerston. My accommodation on the road when not luxuriating in a motel room was to find a suitably private roadside rest area or otherwise appropriate piece of flat grass to set up the tent. A night in my tent was quite a comfortable affair, gas stove providing hot food and at times heat, head torch and gas lamp providing ample light and some heat, a book and the radio providing the entertainment, with a self inflating mattress providing that essential cushion between the hip bone and the hard earth. The first night at Palmerston was noted for a cat turning up at the tent, I thought I might have to adopt it till I realised I was actually only a few hundred metres away from some coastal houses from where it had ventured. As I tucked in for the night my 13 year old never been cold in sleeping bag's zipper bust and along with my leaky boots I was faced with two critical equipment failures at the start of my adventures. Thus in the calm night I contemplated what else might break as I dozed out to the waves, awakened occasionally by the belchings and rumblings of the trucks and trains plying the main highway and trunk line.
The next day was up out of Otago into Canterbury and Banks Peninsula. Cutting across the plain below Christchurch I joined the peninsula at Lake Ellesmere and Kaitorete Spit and was soon entering it's hilly heartland. Banks Peninsula in short is a bunch of highly windy and steep roads dissecting a picturesque scruffy pastoral landscape with large amounts of inlet and outlet coastline. Due to the sinuous nature of the roads I soon realised a full exploration of the area would take a few days rather than the one I had allocated. At least I can make it out to Akaroa and camp in some bay.
Placed on Akaroa Harbour, with quaint buildings, speccy setting, and polished for the tourists veneer, Akaroa struck me as one of the most old worldly postcard villages in NZ. The amount of cafes and tourist paraphernalia hinted that the place must crawl in summer. It had a pleasant colonial maritime feel to it, but it was certainly a lot more upmarket than I expected. I began to drive out to the Head of Akaroa harbour but a ridiculously steep hill leaving the town made me re-study my map I decided to go easy on my possession laiden Audi and get back to the Plains. I turned around and headed for the other side of the peninsula.
Two hours of up-and-down past-bays tiny-windy-narrow-dirt-gravel roads later I was glad to get to something resembling a two lane sealed road and civilisation, though visually it had been worth it. I was opposite to Lyttleton across Lyttleton Harbour and the rugged remoteness of the Peninsula was giving way to lifestyle blocks and Christchurch commuter villages and thus less and less chance of a camping spot.
Eventually I crossed inland back to where I had first entered the peninsula in the morning. As dusk fell I drove out on the long barren sand dune of Kaitorete Spit. Having sat in a deserted car park long enough after dusk to satisfy myself there where no park rangers I set up tent for the night and again dozed to the sound of the Pacific. In the morning I went down to the beach. There was a decent swell coming in and a view right along the spit to the south and north to the hills of the peninsula. I surveyed my surroundings. The morning light filtering through the clouds, the angled beach pounded by the surf, the aural crash of waves, the smell of the sea, local bird life being bird like. In that coastal wilderness moment I thought of the coolness of spending a night on the remote spit, waking up and walking down to the beach, and having the whole winter to pursue emotional endorphins like this.
Hanmer Springs - Lewis Pass
Day three on this road trip was a morning in Christchurch, then up the coast to Hanmer Springs, a place I'd wanted to visit since I was a kid. It had been steady rain the whole way up from Christchurch and was fairly drizzly low cloud by the time I was entering Lewis Pass and the turn-off. I guess I hadn't checked Hanmer out in detail on a map before, or taken note of it when I'd passed within a few miles of it previously, because if I had I wouldn't have thought of Hanmer as a non-descript rural town with hot pools and motels. Crossing an old bridge over a river gorge it was a pleasant surprise to find an alpine village with mountains around it and even ski fields. I spent a very nice hour at the outdoor hot pools in the cold drizzle admiring the surrounding misty ranges.
I carried on the driving through Lewis Pass. I was impressed with this road that I'd thought of as the poorer cousin to the Haast and Arthurs Passes, it was like driving through Fiordland, loads of forested mountains, rivers, all accentuated by autumnal colouring. I spent the night at Deer Creek camping spot in the middle of Lewis Pass.
The following morning the Lewis Pass morphed into the steep sided valleys that take one through to Motueka on the South Island's north facing coast. The remote atmosphere of the valleys gave me the feeling that everywhere you go in the south there are all these other-worldly magical places to be discovered offering up visually aesthetic landscapes. I mused the people living in these places were kiwis yet had so radically different views of NZ compared to their northern urban compatriots. In the area I was driving through their outlook shaped by being off the main roads and physically surrounded by valley walls.
Farewell Spit
From Motueka it was up and over Takaka Hill to another remote pocket, Golden Bay. A grand sweeping crescent of coastline, Golden Bay stretches from the island-paradise vibe of Abel Tasman National Park in the east to the antennae of Farewell Spit, a 22 kilometre lick of sand curving back into Golden Bay. If you look at the western edge of Golden Bay it seems as the spine of the Southern Alps is diminishing into the sea, a range of hills gracefully losing altitude till it completely peters out at the beginning of the Spit. My plan was to go right over to the west coast, about thirty km's from the sealed road that dead ends at the spit, but an annoying rattle in the front of the car made me nervous of going down remote dirt roads so I opted to spend the night near the spit.
Just before dusk I ventured out onto the spit. On a map the Spit appears to be a thin pencil line of sand somehow defying the sea level. It is a bit of a surprise to get on Farewell Spit and find it has both North and South coasts and an interior, not to mention wetlands, ecology, flora and fauna. Having walked around on the Bay side of it for about half an hour I headed up over the dune to discover quite a bit more rolling dunescape. So off I went up and dune till I reached the edge of the dunes only to be met by a good 100 metres of flat beach before the surf, stretching west and east till it blurred into the crepuscular horizon. I returned to my car and drove to a spot I'd spied to set up my tent, it was another calm night. The amazing thing about this trip was that for the four nights I camped there was not a rustle of wind nor a speck of rain, especially considering the coastal aspect of the campsites. In the morning I rerturned to the spit for another walk. . I only made a scratch on its entire 22 km length, which I plan to do one day. All in all the Spit and Golden Bay are another totally neat corner of the South, and I vow to return.
The end of this road trip took me to Picton, a couple of nights in a motel, watching the F.A Cup final before heading to the 5 am ferry and Wellington. A week in Melbourne, then returning to Picton for some serious winter hiking, and that's is where the story picks up next.
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