Time to Head West...
Sunday 20 September
Beautiful morning at Albert Town - we packed slowly, joined a video call & singalong with my sister at a Thompson Twin gig in London (Hold me nowwwww, whoa hold my heart 🎶), had a chat with Steve & lovely Kika (a German wire haired pointer with the best eyebrows!), from the new Hilltop parked just along from us, and pulled out 11 minutes before the official but largely unobserved checkout time.
Over the Clutha and into Three Parks shopping are to complete all the pretrip chores in town (food shop, diesel refuelling, dump station) - not every day you are queued up at the New World checkout ahead of All Blacks coaching legend Steve Hansen! Naturally had to swing by Pembrook Patisserie to get Louis a pork, fennel & apple pie for lunch, before heading to Hāwea and on to the Haast Pass.
The road into the Pass was badly affected by rain about 3-4 weeks back, and has remained partially closed since then due to repairs taking place. The Hāwea side seems to be all good now, but there is still work going on up the side of Lake Wānaka from The Neck up towards Makaroa. It’s open at weekends now but operates single direction convoys during the week. It was certainly a bumpy ride and you could see a lot of damage along the way but we made it to one of our favourite DOC camps at Cameron Flat. Our fridge definitely felt the effects of all those bumps - note to self, keep all the new supplies in the chilly bag when we are heading out after a big shop up! It really was rather over stuffed!!
Cameron Flat was looking fabulous as ever - we lunched with the sandflies, got visited by a piwakawaka, then took a wee siesta before walking across to the Blue Pools, which to be fair, were more emerald at this time of day. It was the quietest we’ve ever seen with around 10 vehicles in the carpark and maybe 25 people down at the pools or on the track.
The new swingbridge was still looking good and the evening sunshine on the Makaroa River was lovely. We crossed to the swingbridge over the Blue River gorge as the stunningly clear, teal colours waters swirl down to meet the main river. Shafts of sunlight pierced through the gorge, lighting up the second bridge, the people on it and the waters below. We got ourselves a real selfie and a shadow selfie and I got chatting with a couple of Aussies and took their pics for them - naturally sharing the 16:9 aspect ratio
secret too!
We wandered down to the stony promontory between the two rivers where some hardy soul had been taking a chilly dip as we arrived; Louis chose skimming stones as a less icy option and I spent a while capturing a couple of friends taking funny photos of each other up on the bridge!
Back at Cameron Flat we had gained 2 neighbouring vans but we all locked ourselves inside to avoid the pesky sandflies!
Delicious beef picana steaks for dinner - gotta love a reduced to clear bargain! Checked out “The Marlow Murder Club” on the iPad because that was my old stomping ground as a teenager (spoiler alert, it’s pretty poor TV but the scenery is lovely!)
Spent the evening sorting several hundred photos from the Snow League while Louis watched “The Fellowship of the Ring” - spotting so many locations that we’ve visited along our Odyssey!
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