Day 11 Let there be rain.

Well we knew that New Zealand was supposed to resemble the U.S. Northwest in climate, so we were prepared for rain, but until today we’d not seen a single drop of it. It wasn’t pouring, but it was a steady drizzle out there when we woke up. We lounged around most of the morning and after lunch we all took off to do a couple of local hikes/walks. The first one was to what is known as PuPu springs, which was supposedly some local pond that was supplied by underground springs and was among the clearest water in the world. We drove about 30 minutes out to what seemed like the middle of nowhere and came to what we thought was the right spot, there was a trail there so we took it for a bit, but soon realized we’d overshot the road we were looking for a this wasn’t PuPu spring. We walked around a short bit, there was a river running through this area that drove a turbine station which you could walk to and check out. We were here for about 10 to 15 minutes and then backtracked to the real PuPu springs.

It was a short walk to the spring, which is a sacred area for the Mauri, and the sign there explained that the only known clearer water in the world is located under the ice caps in Antartica. They had a periscope thing which allowed you to look under the water and that really gave a good perspective on how clear it was. The spring was about 50 yards across, and basically like a big bowl with a stream running out of it. It was about 20 ft deep in the center and had various vegetation growing in it. The overall walk around that area was pretty short, about 20 to 30 minutes, so we decided we needed to go find another hike to do since we had plenty of time.

We drove for about 45 minutes out to the end of the cape, which is the northern most point in the South Island of New Zealand, on the western tip. We hiked out to the beach here, which was really nice, even though it had begun to drizzle once again but not bad enough to make it too uncomfortable. The walk to the beach was nice, we actually walked through pastures of sheep all the way there and since it was spring there were loads of little baby sheep running around. The beach itself was very cool looking, large rock formations out in the water and a very rugged coastline. The beach is called Whariki beach and there are plenty of hiking spots here, but after about 30 minutes in the rain we wanted to get back since Betsy was carrying Lila (their 7 month old baby) and didn’t want her to get too cold and wet.

It was about 5PM and we headed back to the house for a quick stop to pick up the baby food and then out to the Mussle Inn, a somewhat famous bar in these parts, for dinner and some drinks. The bar was really rustic and cool, and the interior was really small, I’d say there were only about 5 or 6 tables for eating in there. It’s a good thing we got there as early as we did, otherwise we’d have been sitting outside or waiting for a while to get a seat inside. We were starving and ordered up some snacks before getting the meal, all the food was really good and pretty inexpensive. The other cool thing was that they brewed all of their own beer here, as well as ginger beer (non-alcoholic) and it was all very good. We hung out at the Mussle Inn for a couple hours and then just headed back to the house to end the evening. On the way back we swung into a tavern and bought some Tui to have back at the house. The rest of the evening consisted of Jason and I finishing off all the Tui beer and talking while Marlo and Betsy chatted. We didn’t stay up as late as we did last night, which was a good thing since Marlo and I had to be up and out of there at a reasonable time to get to where we wanted by tomorrow at dinner time.