eNZed - day 16 (30-5-5)

I woke up and ate the ambrosia of the gods… feijoa yogurt! Dave just couldn’t pass up another ride along that crazy-ass road from yesterday, so we headed back up to Reatihi (rrrray-uh-tee-hee) to go back down the Whanganui National Park Road – I wonder what it looks like in the summer – with the goal of hiking to a ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ at Pipiriki (pee-pee-ree-kee).

On the way, we got stuck in the middle of a cattle drive. I had NO idea how big cows are. And loud. MMMMAAAAAAAHHHHHHOW…. I’M A COOOOW…..

How could we not get hungry after that? So we stopped at Café Angel Louise for lunch. YUM! Of course, Jack Johnson’s new album was on repeat, but I just love that constellations song and now it will forever remind me of this place. We went next store to this little store where I bought postcards and Dave bought maps. Dave got grumped at by the funny old lady behind the money box for not having exact change (he seemed a little befuddled), but I was told that I was allowed since I did have exact change : P naaaaahhh – that’s my sticking my tongue out sound haha!

We saw all the slips from yesterday, but the sunlight cleared up the story a bit. Definitely not rock/weathered rock, but fairly highly compressed fine grained sand to silt. There’s absolutely no cementation of any type. The cliffs are very steep, especially the areas that have been recently cut. There’s lots of places where the road is only one lane cause the other side fell off.

We arrived at Pipiriki and were heading down the road to the hike when Dave said he didn’t want to go because it was going to take too long since the road was so bad and we still had 30Km to go. I must still have been annoyed about the goat situation from yesterday cause I got all bitchy, then he got all bitchy, and A was stuck in the middle. We ended up turning around and trying to go to the hike that Dave was really thinking about the whole time instead of the one I wanted to do.




Dave’s hike ended up having a closed sign, but being from Hawaii, we just figured it didn’t mean anything, so we tried to do it anyway. When we got up to where the trail crew was working we felt a little sheepish, but played it off. They were clearing a land slip that happened a year ago! It definitely looked like a big one.

So we headed back down the road stopping in many places to take pics.






Dave kept going on and on about how great it would be to camp on the side of the road here. I told him he was nuts, I didn’t want to be trying to sleep wondering if every little noise I heard was a mountain of mud and water rushing down to crush me. He scoffed at me and told me I could inspect the chosen grounds to ensure our safety. We ended settling on a little camping area on the river side of the road.

We decided on mushroom-tomato-basil-shells for dinner, which A did a wonderful job cutting all the veggies up for – even with me “helping” =). Dave worked on a tarp made out of rain-fly and tent footprint to shelter us from the rain and wind. We decided to be daring tonight and try sleeping with the back door (A and I even were going to put our heads towards the drivers seat..) of the van open so we didn’t have to dismantle Daves excellent construction job, but mosquitoes quickly found us – Plus, Dave didn’t think he could take down a goat with his knife if it took the Nutella, so we’ll have to wait til morning to see if the goats came sniffing out our veggies scraps!