OLDFART BIKERS' PAGES

Day 8: The Catlins!

Stocked up at Woolies on the way to the outlaws to say ta-ta.  What a shock!  I've noticed when Jackie has come to stay with us that she is not a morning person: at home she looks more so.  Lindsay deserves a medal for twenty years of waking up to that, poor man.  Anyhoo, we left them to it, and headed out of Dodge

The Catlins: everything you have heard is true.  I will let the pictures do the talking.

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Day Nine

So we awoke this morning at Owaka and headed off via Cannibals Bay to Nugget Point Lighthouse, which has been the backdrop for several NZ short stories of the noir persuasion.  No wonder!  What a backdrop: absolute geographical drama.

From Nugget Point to Balclutha to check if we could afford to carry on (yup, all good), and then I had the bright idea of crossing the Clutha on the Tuapeka Mouth punt.  Except it don't run on the weekend, but it was a very pleasant place to stop and have lunch.  We are now hoochied up at Cromwell, and will head up via Tekapo and so on and so forth on the morrow.  There are more pictures, too.

Day Ten

After a surprisingly warm night at Cromwell (never got below thirteen) we left at 0845 headed for Lindis.  Sunstrike was a problem as we climbed: as the sun rose the road pitched up to meet it.  Wide vistas of next to nothing on the hills, interspersed with bright green patches on the flats where they are irrigated.  Dairying is already in the high basins, as we saw on the approaches to Omarama.  One semi circular centre-pivot irrigator was parked along the road fence as we passed, and I measured it at 1.2 km long: massive money, massive technology, so I guess they are projecting that dairy payouts will be staying, well, massive.

The view up Lake Pukaki was obscured by spillover from some very dirty weather on the coast, so no you-beaut long shots of Aoraki, but some dramatic shots of the weather sneaking around the shoulder of the mountain and into the head of the lake. 

We made a detour before Tekapo to the top of Mt John: glad I am we did not leave it till later, because by the time Jean had battled the wind to get up to the cafe, and I had stopped shutterbugging, the cafe staff had just had a phone call telling them to close up and get everyone off the mountain because of wind.  We called into Tekapo to get fuel and use the potties - what a horrible place it is now.  It has been turned into a new and just as bad as  Pauanui/Queenstown/Wanaka/Paihia.  The Church by the lake has been, basically, desecrated by tourists, some of them of moronic stupidity.  Check out the dinky-di Orstralian I overheard wondering aloud why the church didn't have a stained glass window, which would look fantastic with the light off the Lake shining through it.  So bloody plank-thick he couldn't look through the window and see more beauty than he needed right there.  Inbred, trans-Tasman, mono-eyebrowed hillbilly.  His sister-cousin-wife didn't correct him, so I guess she was another genetic defect.  Good onya, Cletis-Leroy.

Was going to head for Fairlie for the night, but a look at the watch and the map suggested a better idea: down Burkes Pass, up and over Mackenzie Pass (by crikey, that MacKingiss musta been a good stockman, and his dogs the best (there HAD to be more than one dog, despite the legend), and then through the Hakataramea Pass, down the Valley, across the Kurow Bridges over the Waitaki River, and here we are for the night, 52 kilometres away from where we had coffee at Omarama at ten o'clock this morning.  But what a day, what massive country! 

The roads?  Well, we got some funny looks over the MacKenzie and Hakataramea Passes from the very few locals we saw, who sat in their four wheel drives shaking their heads at the townies in a low, heavy, front drive saloon, but no major problems.  I walked some of the fords first before driving them, just to be sure, and I was prepared to spend time shifting rocks if I had to, to get the right angles for the air dam to clear.  In the end I found a driveable line through all of them without having to road-build, and we only scraped the belly three or four times in the deep metal stretches.  No danger, Park Ranger.

Tomorrow, Ch-ch, and both Crowther and Coubrough rellies to visit.