Tuesday 15 November – bridges and blowholes

So the storm they predicted definitely hit with force during the night, torrential rain and very strong winds we were glad to be in bed and not camping out but unfortunately it was rather noisy. Luckily it had pretty much blown itself out by this morning so we were able to load up the car in a light drizzle so we were optimistic that we might actually have a rain free journey to Barrytown. The drive today was scheduled to take about five and a half hours, and that would be without stopping so we set off by climbing over the Takaka pass which we had done on the way to Golden Bay, the difference being that apart from the top was clear so we actually could see the view, this took us just over an hour and once we had cleared the top most of the journey was in sunshine. After about 3 hours we stopped at Hope Saddle which had fantastic views over the surrounding countryside, we took a walk to the view point where you could see for miles in all directions, at the top there was a marker that showed all the mountains and passes (saddles) in the area, surprisingly none of them seemed to have snow on top. We sat and had lunch looking at the view then set off for Buller Gorge which has the longest swing bridge in New Zealand, on the way we stopped in Murchison for some fuel and there was a really interesting looking old general store just at the back of the garage. Buller Gorge is the site of a fault line and you should be able to see where the earth was pushed up by 4 metres, unfortunately there is now so much vegetation that has grown it makes it very hard to see. The swing bridge is very flimsy and doesn’t actually have any planks of wood on the floor just iron grating which was a bit much for Chris who tried but couldn’t get across so I went over and did the loop walk which actually wasn’t that good as a lot of the walk is through trees and is quite muddy because of all the rain we have had. Chris did make it part way onto the bridge so could at least see the water running through then Gorge. After this we set off for the Pancake Rocks at Punakaiki where if the tidal conditions are right you should see blowholes, the first place we came to was Truman’s Track which is a walk down to the beach where there is a waterfall and a couple of caves, we saw starfish hanging onto the side of the rocks – they were vibrant colours, and the seaweed seemed to be dancing in the tide. We walked back to the car and went to the pancake rocks, these are so called because they look like pancakes. It is sandstone layers and geologists aren’t sure what causes it, they had previously thought it was to do with compression but they are not so sure now. The walk took us down to the coastline and although we didn’t see any of the blowholes the waves crashing onto the rocks was quite spectacular and hypnotic, by the time we had finished walking round it was almost 6pm so we decided we should head off to our accommodation which was about half an hour away – we had taken about eight hours to do the journey! We are staying in a B&B where dinner is provided so after introducing ourselves we arranged to have dinner about 8pm then went to the room to have a quick drink overlooking the sea before going back to join Russell and Sandy for dinner. The meal was really nice as it wasn’t too much, we then sat talking for a couple of hours and finally came back to the room to write the blog and get into bed about 11 pm one of our later nights!