What Goes Up...

Thursday 19 December

Woke to a partly sunny but very gusty day - met the local wildlife at the camp then pottered a bit before putting up the Christmas decorations (bit minimalist this year!)

We found a map of walks in the Sounds and decided to head to Te Mahia as there were several short walks in the area. The road in was quite an adventure with basically a sign saying “proceed at your peril” as there had been a lot of flood damage and single lane sections where half the road had washed away! But the views along the way were breathtaking.

We stopped at Te Mahia resort to admire the views, get a coffee and a ginger crunch and find out where the walking tracks started - not there it turned out! Still, sitting look out over Kenepuru Sound wasn't a bad way to recover from the swirly drive over.

Pointed in the right direction and armed with a map of sorts, we drove up and over the saddle to Mistletoe Bay to pick up a track. Due to a lack of hard information we picked the hardest route/root going pretty much straight upwards over the gnarliest tree root path ever! We started on the James Vogel Circle Track then got distracted by the temptation of the Onahau Lookout Track and detoured onto that.

The forest was stunning even though the tricksy roots were trying to trip us up at every turn, and we climbed about 200m before the path opened up onto sandy & stony track. The views from here, above the main tree line were phenomenal.

We never made the lookout though, both of us were concerned about how my knees would cope with climbing back down over all those tree roots... but then we discovered on our way down that there was a much easier path which started/finished higher up the road with an easy stroll back down the stony road to the parked Pajero, so went back that way! Doh!

Chill evening in the van working on our website, when Banjo rocked gently for about 5 seconds - it was different to the wind buffeting us around - Louis reckoned it was a small earthquake while I blamed the roadworks trucks we had seen the previous day...turns out it was a 4.1 quake centred about 46km directly below us - my first ever earthquake!!