Lake Matheson ; Munro Beach ; Haast ; Jackson Bay ; Lake Hawea ; Wanaka - Mount Aspiring Road

(Posted from Wanaka Internet Cafe)
(This post covers 26 - 28 February, 2013)

-------------------------------

Thursday, 28 February -

This morning we left Kidd’s Bush campground at the head of Lake Hawea for the town of Wanaka (WAN-a-ka) and provisioning. We first went to the Mount Aspiring National Park visitor’s center to ask our questions on where to get groceries and showers and where to drop off our trash. The trash question comes up because all the camps have ‘please take your trash with you’ signs. At some point we can’t do that anymore!
In this case, the answer from the guy behind the desk was for us to go to the grocery store and buy a trash bag for $3.50 and, when filled, take it to a trash and recycling facility out of town. He said this approach ‘encourages everyone to produce less trash’.
Well, that may be the official answer but it doesn’t work in a small van. We only create a small amount of trash but need to get rid of it at least every other day.
Once into Wanaka proper we saw the guy may have been giving us the official line but we easily found trash receptacles near the city park and toilets and at the grocery store. It wasn’t a problem after all.
This trash thing reminds me of the signs we were seeing in the toilets at campgrounds. The sign would say ‘Don’t leave your rubbish here” and then direct us to somewhere to take the rubbish... like bins along the main street of a nearby town. However, some signs merely gave us directions to a nearby town’s trash-and-recycling facility and the hours they are open--- and they were only open two to three hours one day a week! We’re all for cooperating with the local means of disposing of trash but it has to be practical.
After provisioning we decided to forego showers for now and get out to the trail. We drove out the incredible Wanaka-Mount Aspiring Road, a very picturesque drive along the lower lake with views up to snow-capped peaks-- even today, that last day of New Zealand summer.
After 25K or so the road turned to gravel and a very wash-boarded surface it is.... for another 30K! We continued along the river through sheep and cattle stations (ranches). At one point we had to wait for a thousand sheep. We had arrived just as they were driven out onto the road by dogs and young cowboy-hatted guys on ATVs (or as they’re known here, “quadbikes”). We were only delayed twenty minutes and it was very interesting to see the dogs working the sheep and hear the whistles of the guys on the quadbikes directing the dogs.
The gravel road kept getting smaller and smaller and we had to keep an eye out for surprise oncoming vehicles. After an hour we came to the end of the road--- and the car-park was crowded with vehicles!
The car-park here is the Raspberry Creek site and it’s the departure point for multiple hikes into the surrounding mountains. We chose the Rob Roy Glacier Track.
We hiked for 20 minutes to a suspension bridge crossing the river, then started up. And up. And up. We walked another 40 minutes on a narrow trail and had another hour to go when we came to a section of trail which had been wiped out by a landslide and a warning sign telling us to be careful in this area. The trail took a hard right turn up a steep hill and it was both wide enough for only one and completely exposed with no hand-holds. And on the way down we would face a drop off of hundreds of feet at the turn. We had had enough. We had gotten a good look at the Rob Roy hanging glacier from a viewpoint as we climbed and I’m sure an up-close view would be spectacular. But the trail-damage area was just a little too challenging for us.
We walked back to the van, arriving around 1530. Though we were parked in full sun, there was a good breeze keeping the van cool so we decided to stay here for the night and enjoy the sun setting over the mountains surrounding us.
After supper we worked on the laptops and looked forward to a night in the mountains.

-------------------------
Wednesday, 27 February -

This morning we woke to another perfect sunny morning. We’ve been in-country two weeks and have yet to be rained on. Yesterday was our first serious overcast but by mid-day even that had a summery feel to it. I’m not complaining, I’m just noting it’s not what we expected.
Today we wanted to take a day off from walking. We drove to the Haast Visitor’s Center, mostly looking for ideas, and found instead an excellent facility. We paid our $6 to watch the visitor’s film (an odd custom of New Zealand government visitor’s centers is charging us to show us film promoting their area!) and saw an interesting but dated production. The content was good but our eyes are now used to high-definition photography and the visuals on this one looked like it was 16 millimeter film from the Seventies.
However, the rest of the center was great. They have a gift shop, as is typical, but it’s upscale and had books and clothing we’ve not seen elsewhere and prices seemed more reasonable.
The museum portion of the center had very good historical photographs and displays. The Haast and Jackson Bay areas were planned to be development centers for the area but it didn’t work out well. Immigrants were brought to the area but it was a hardscrabble life. It rained so much many of the crops rotted in the fields. The incredible amount of water flowing down from the mountains isolated some families by trapping them beyond impassable rivers of run-off. Diseases easily took hold.
In the late 1880’s a government official visited in response to calls for government to build a wharf at Jackson Bay so the area could be supplied by ship. But the official decided it was too costly for all the more trade available and recommended against it.
In the 1860’s gold was found nearby and that of course led to a temporary boom but most gold-seekers went home empty-handed and left Hasst and Jackson Bay with only a few subsistence-level farmers and fishermen.
A World War II project to build a road through the Southern Alps finally linked the remote wilderness of the west coast with the interior and tourism eventually became a critical driver of the economy, as it is today.
The center is so good, I imagine, because the Haast area is designated a World Heritage Site and as such gets the full attention of the best professionals to develop and maintain its centers. The huge and pristine wilderness area runs from mountain top to the sea and occupies hundreds of square miles.
After the visitor’s center, we then drove to Jackson Bay, some 30 miles off the main road and our last view of the Tasman Sea before we cross back through the Southern Alps to the interior.
After snapping photos off the wharf at Jackson Bay (green-mirror sea, mountains in the distance) we had a portion of fish and chips (bluenose was the fish today) from ‘The Cray Pot’ in the our little van. Excellent!
After lunch we headed back to Haast and then on via the Haast Pass through the Southern Alps. We pretty much bee-lined this one, given that we were walked-out and needed to get to a camp for the night.
On the eastern side we stopped at the visitor’s center above Laka Wanaka and scored some good tips for views and freedom-camping sites for the next few days.
We then drove on down along Lake Wanaka and to Lake Hawea, then back a 10K gravel road to Kidd’s Bush Campground, a DOC site at the end of the lake.
After supper I walked the nearby nature trail for about a half hour and then worked on the blog a bit while Labashi worked on photos.

--------------------------------

Tuesday, 26 February -

We woke this morning at Clearwater Bridge to the sound of a cow bellowing time and again. It appears we parked in the path of the herd’s morning exercise and Bossy didn’t like it! The herd eventually figured out how to go around but it was touch-and-go there for a while.
The Clearwater Bridge campsite is a free one and though it’s humble (it’s just a clearing alongside a dry streambed) it’s within stone-tossing distance of the Department of Conservation’s Peak View pulloff. When the weather cooperates this is a perfect place to look across the valley at the sunlit Fox Glacier and the snowy peaks of Mount Tasman and Mount Cook.
But this morning we had fog just above the treetops and heavy clouds obscuring the peaks. It looked like it might rain any second.
After pack-up we drove to the nearby cafe at Lake Matheson. They have a wi-fi hotspot and when I looked into the details the deal wasn’t bad. Five dollars for 24 hours and 100 MB of capacity. And the good thing on this one was we could share it.
I caught up the blog and posted an entry online, checked our phone message machine at home (via Skype), and picked up our email. Labashi spent her time sending out a few emails of photos from the last few days.
We were there long enough to have lunch and noticed the sky clearing a bit at the peaks. We walked back the Lake Matheson path hoping for a view but the clouds soon closed back up and we decided to move on.
As we walked back to the car a hitchhiker asked for a ride to town. She was Diana, a twenty-something woman from Switzerland, near Basil. She was looking for a ride to the Franz Joseph glacier but we were going the other way once we got to the main road. We asked if she was a student but she works a full time job and is just taking a holiday as part of her seven-week vacation time (seven weeks!!!!!).
We dropped Diana in town and picked up a few items at the corner market store before driving south.
Today we were hoping to see Fjordland Crested Penguins at Munro Beach. We didn’t get to the parking lot until 1700 and it was a 45 minute walk to the beach. This beach feels very remote. The water of the Tasman Sea is green-hued and ultra-clear. The beach itself is fine, rounded pebbles at the water’s edge and after the waves come ashore, they rattle the larger rocks together as they retreat, making an odd sound. A few feet further inland, another layer of rocks, these about two-to-three inches in diameter and all rounded by the action of the waves, making it difficult to walk. You sink in with every step everywhere on that beach.
Unfortunately, there was no sign of penguins today, endangered or otherwise. There are supposed to only be something on the order of 1500 breeding pairs of these in the world so it would have been special to see them. We are at the outer edge of their season here so it was a long shot at best. We did get a nice walk out of it but with yesterday’s over-doing, the walk tired us more than it seems it should have.
We then drove south in search of a campground. We had two free ones on the NZ Camping app to our south, and a pay one not far to the north. It was getting late but we thought we’d take a shot at the freebies.
When we came to the place on the map where the first was supposed to be, we found a stop sign in the middle of the dirt turnoff road. Something must have changed there.
We continued south another 20 minutes to the Waito River mouth, a place described as a large open area where whitefish fisherman gather each year for the whitefish season. We couldn’t find anything that looked like a large parking area and went so far as to explore back an overgrown lane with a SHUT THE GATE sign on it. But that one led out onto open sandy beach and I was lucky enough to have enough room to turn around on solid ground but just beyond was soft sand. There was no way I was going to venture into that sand. Also, we had crossed a low, muddy area which I feared might fill with water overnight when the tide came in.
We turned back and back toward the hard road found a small two-track leading onto the dry river bed. There were tracks from other vehicles but it did’t look like anyone had been camping there. Nevertheless, this was a legitimate freedom-camping site according to the Westland rules for freedom camping. We found a flat spot and settled in. About 30 minutes later another campervan came in looking for the place but didn’t stay.
We were quite happy with our spot until about midnight. I noticed the buzzing of a mosquito and turned on my light to chase it. I swatted it and four more, each just floating into view along the ceiling of the van as I lay there with the reading light turned to the ceiling. That seemed like a lot of mosquitoes so I got up and started looking for more of them. In the next half hour I killed about 30 of them. There was obviously a hole in our defenses.
I found the screen in the roof vent was broken so that would account for some of them. But I suspect others were coming in the van’s vents. We used duct tape to block off the ceiling vent and I closed all the dashboard vents. After another twenty minutes of swatting, I finally felt I was getting ahead of them.
We woke twice more in the night, each time finding one or two but we had stopped the onslaught and finally dropped off to sleep.

*************** END OF POST *************