Using Our DOC Pass at Last!

Oct 23, 2025
3 min read

Wednesday 15 October

Started the day with a singalong boogie online with my sister video calling me from the Bjorn Again gig in London - you can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life! 🎶. Half of the Cafe de Paris ladies seemed to be there as we screeched along to Voulez vous, Lay all your love on me and Dancing Queen - it was so much fun!

Got up & dressed and put on our Red Band gumboots to squelch our way across to check out the earthquake wall. Built in 1964, it’s 24m long, set across the Alpine Fault with the idea of measuring tectonic plate movement. In over 50 years, no movement has been detected so the presumption is that the plates are static until a big quake shifts them rather than constantly wiggling and jiggling a little bit.

Packed up Banjo and hit the road heading west initially, stopped for coffee & diesel in Springs Junction before turning north up towards Murchison. Checked out the Maruia Falls which are thundering at present, and scientifically threw a few big sticks into the swirling currents below to watch where the waters took them - fascinating!

Popped into Murchison NZMCA to offload rubbish etc and fill up the water tanks for the next few days, had lunch and a wander then set off in a big horseshoe loop north, east then south to St Arnaud on the shores of Lake Rotoiti. The signs of erosion in the mountains and along the river banks are quite bleak - the rivers are cutting ever wider swathes through the landscape every time they break their banks (which is quite often at this time of year) and many of the roads are cut into the mountains with the potential to be washed out from below, or covered in falling mud, trees, rocks etc from above.

NZMCA Murchison was a very easy & functional park, so we emptied our rubbish, our toilet cassette and our grey water then topped up the fresh water tanks for the next few days (DOC camp water is not officially potable as it doesn't meet NZ drinking water standards, but it is really fine, and what many of the locals use - but we just thought we would avoid any risk). In the camp was a stark memorial to the 17 people who died in the 1929 earthquake in this area - a copper disc for each life lost and the suspended copper discs representing the movement of the earth.

Murchison itself looked quite fun - good toilets (always a bonus) with funky signage, an enticing retro/vintage store called Dust & Rust and an assortment of food truck & cafe options. Sticking on our budget, we ate lunch in Banjo on the side of the road before pressing on to the Lakes.

The highway into the Nelson Lakes National Park opened out across a wide farming valley dissected by the mighty Buller River and a few gusts across the fields gave Banjo a wiggle, but it wasn't as windy as we had feared it might be. At St Arnaud we pulled into a great DOC camp at Kerr Bay and we just snuck in 4 days here on the DOC pass before it switched to paid bookings only this weekend! Tricky spot to manoeuvre Banjo into, but we managed and set off to explore the beautiful area.

It was every bit as stunning as we remembered from our day trip here in January with Abby - but the lake water was definitely wayyyyy colder! The "tuna" or long fin eels under the main jetty were extraordinary - some were over a metre long and they all huddled together like a bowl of noodles! We took a stroll up to the DOC office, up a woodland path being serenaded by fluffed up bell birds; but it was closed already for the day so we wandered on into "town", past a house with a cool corrugated iron fence and rusty Corten steel gate (stores idea for future home) then found a path which came all the way back along the Black Valley Stream to Kerr Bay. As we got there, the rain started to fall gently, with the sun behind us and very appropriately, a rainbow glowed gently across Rainbow Mountains.