New Zealand on a Very Tight Budget Day 22
Sorry no Wi Fi or mobile signal at Lake Waikaremoana!
So we were up with the bird-scarers at 7ish and drove in to sample the delights of Napier. The city was pretty much destroyed by a massive earthquake in the 1930s and rebuilt in the prevailing style of the day - Art Deco. There is a great deal of very fine Art Deco architecture in NZ, I can only assume it was a period of relative prosperity and expansion. There are several complete streets of Art Deco buildings many with the original windows and there are tours you can go on in vintage style cars.
Ironically one of the best examples is well outside the city centre at the port. The entrance to the old tobacco company is fantastic and features on a lot of the publicity material and yet I wonder how many tourists actually find it.
The weather continued to hold but we felt very much that we were turning into the storm as we headed up the Pacific Coast Highway lunching at the entrancing Lake Tutira and down the incredible Mohaka River gorge before taking the fantastic Waikarimoana Road in land.
The landscape was constantly changing from the frilly hilly sort to huge sweeping valleys and forested mountain sides.
Lake Waikarimoana is at the heart of the massive Te Urewera National Park but if you drive through it on your way to Rotorua you have in excess of 125Km of dirt road to cover! There is a huge hydro electricity plant just before you reach the Lake built in the 1920s. They used a traction engine to pull a massive trailer to get the equipment up the mountain. The trailer then got repurposed as a bridge for 50 years before it got rescued and put on display.
We were very excited when we arrived despite the low cloud and light drizzle and delighted with our cabin. It contained the unimaginable luxuries of a double bed with clean sheets, a kettle, toaster and microwave and an en-suite shower room with flushing toilet! Even the BV got a roof over its head!
Friday dawned with very low cloud and persistent drizzle but we stuck with our plan to walk the one hour to Lake Waikareiti. We certainly felt we were appreciating the true feel of the rain forest on the way up – a 300 metre steady climb. The rain seemed to be getting heavier as we reached the day shelter on its famously pristine shore so we retreated inside for some refreshments and to read the info and admire the view such as it was.
A strange thing then happened. The rain suddenly stopped and the sun came out! And it stayed out for most of the day.
We walked back with rainbows dancing in front of us as the drops fell off the trees in the slanting sunshine. On the way we met a group of NZ guys pulling a trolley. They said they were going to spend a couple of nights at the hut at Sandy Bay and as they were all carrying huge ruck sacks we can only assume they were telling the truth when they said the trolley was full of beer! Now we had considered spending a night at Sandy Beach hut ourselves until the weather forecast was so bad – I’m not sure whether we have had a lucky escape or missed a treat!
Back at the car park we crossed the road and continued down to the totally unheralded Aniwaniwa Falls. This turned out to be a genuinely impressive double waterfall – sadly there was no point at which you could photograph both falls together. There was no one there and we lunched where the river entered the Lake.
We even went for a swim later it was that nice although the weather forecast posted at the shop said it should have rained all day.