As we travel around New Zealand, we’ve been trying to stay at DOC campgrounds as often as possible. The Department of Conservation campgrounds are usually $10/night or less and there are even quite a few free campgrounds around the country. We’ve had some excellent campsites where you could cast a line from the tent into the surf, lay down on a cushy mat of grass (have I mentioned that New Zealand has to be the world’s greatest place to grow thick green grass? Really. It’s unbelievable how campgrounds that get an insane amount of use still have a nice mat of grass to camp on–no dirt patches around here!), or chill a Mike’s Ale in a cool mountain stream. The past two days, however, have been a bit different and interesting to say the least.
Two nights ago after a day of exploring Kaikoura Peninsula, we headed to Gray River Forest Park to camp for the evening. It looked like a nice spot, even though we would be 30 minutes from the ocean, and it would allow us to take a hike the next day up Mt. Grey. As we drove to the campground, the road turned to gravel and we kept climbing and climbing and climbing up through pine forests. The further we went, the more we kept joking about how we hoped there would be space for us at the campground. When we finally arrived at the site, we were thoroughly surprised to see a full campground of about 20 people. Since they were all sitting together, we figured it must be a big family or group of friends out for the weekend. We parked AGY in the one small space where there was still room and took out our chairs and got ready to make dinner.
As we were getting our things together, one of the group’s members came over and started to talk to us about him and his friends who love nature and love to come out here and enjoy the “native bush” and how they also like to have raves in the woods (I must have missed the David Attenborough series on Nature Raves) and how the black birch trees have little hairs on them with droplets of “honey” on the ends, and a whole bunch of other jibberish that didn’t make much sense to me or Joanie. At first I couldn’t pinpoint what was so strange about the way this guy was talking. Afterwards, we realized that he was talking to us as if we did not speak English.
Now, we’ve definitely learned that we do not pronounce many words similarly. Aluminum is a great example. But, it’s still the same language and it doesn’t take much to figure things out. Anyway, this guy went back to his group, we made our dinner, and then another guy came over to see us. He apparently had some sense about him still and was able to more precisely explain what was about to happen. He and his associates put raves on for other groups of people out in the woods. Rather than find a nice piece of farmland where other people don’t try to go camping (which is virtually everywhere that is not a forest, park, or preserve), they chose the DOC campground for this evening’s party. There was going to be music through a PA system, it was going to last until 2 or 3 in the morning, we were welcome to stay and hang out if we wanted, but this was our fair warning. Fair enough, I guess. He did a much better job of explaining why we would want to leave, and why that other character sounded like a complete nutjob. So, after our dinner we left what we thought was going to be our peaceful mountain abode and made the late evening drive to another DOC site about 30 minutes further southwest.
We spent the next day driving and exploring a number of different places–Ashley Gorge, the towns of Ashburton and Geraldine and other small roadside stops. Geraldine had to be the highlight. We went there to see the World’s Largest Jersey (sweater) as verified by the Guinness Book of World Records. Geraldine is a small town and it wasn’t hard to find the shop with the big sweater. The sweater actually wasn’t that impressive, and certainly not as cool as the giant salmon that we had seen earlier in the day.
However, in the back room of the wool shop with the sweater was something that neither of us expected and that the guidebooks really missed out on. The sweater was nothing compared to what was back here–a mosaic replica of the Bayeux Tapestry made entirely out of tiny pieces of steel from some discarded sewing equipment. Over 1.5 million of these little steel pieces were broken off, laid down, and painted with a single tiny paintbrush over the course of 25 years to complete the tapestry. The tapestry, for those of you who don’t remember your 10th grade history (Mr. Cosentino would be so proud), depicts a historic event of 1066–the Battle of Hastings. The real tapestry is missing the last quarter of the story, but Michael’s daughter designed the last several panels and, viola, the world’s only complete tapestry depicting the events of 1066. Best of all, Michael was there to share all the details and history with us, and he is quite an interesting fellow. He is quite a mathematician. In his spare time, which he must have a lot of now that he’s done with the mosaic, he creates games and puzzles. He spent about 45 minutes with us, teaching us how to use a binary calculator (this peg board enabled him to “crunch” a 150 digit number in minutes while it would have taken a computer days to even get close) and showing us a variety of puzzles and games all based on math. It was incredibly fascinating, and I felt incredibly dumb as he quickly went through the explanations of each game. We eventually had to pull ourselves away from both the games and our host who was obviously excited to have some visitors in his shop. It was time to head south toward Trotters Gorge and another DOC campground.
We pulled into Trotters Gorge just a little while before sunset and quickly made dinner under an increasingly grey sky. The short road into the campground crossed two small rivers, each crossing being a giant concrete ford that passed over the bed of the river. After the rain started to fall, we even joked about getting stuck in the gorge, but just settled into our tent and got ready to fall asleep for the evening. Then we saw a light shining through the tent and someone saying, “Hello? Hello? The river’s going to rise and I’ve got a paddock where you can park your car and you can stay the night at my place. You won’t be able to drive out of here if the river rises.” It’s always funny talking to someone through a tent when you can’t see a thing. After a short minute of this blind conversation, we emerged from our tent thinking that we would pull the tent down quick, drive across the rivers and then set it up again on the other side. However, our rescuer Steve who lived across the way generously insisted on putting us, and a few other campers, up in his house.
At this point the rain was really coming down and the prospect of crawling into a twice soaked tent didn’t sound good so we took up the offer. It turns out that Steve had literally rescued about 10 other campers just weeks before who had been stuck in the campground for 3 days after a heavy rain. Like our host earlier in the day, Steve seemed happy to have some company and some ears and he told us all about the incident just weeks ago. He even made it onto the front page of the newspaper. About 10 campers were in the gorge when some heavy rains soaked the area, caused the rivers to rapidly rise (about 1 foot/hour), and made the road impassable. Even Steve lost his station wagon when he tried driving through one of the fords in order to get to his house. After a couple of days of the river being so high, he decided to go have a look at the campground and found these frantic campers who were short on food, needed to get to an airport, etc. He set up a highline and sent some food and water across the river to them, and eventually pulled them and their cars across the river. After hearing the story and seeing the pictures we were mighty glad that he came to get all of us out of the campground.
So, we spent the rest of the night listening to his stories, his opinions of the DOC, looking at photos of cars that he has fixed up over the years, stained glass windows that he has made for churches, masonry repairs that he has made on cathedrals, etc. His ability to take a car that had been seemingly demolished in a crash and repair to look like new again was pretty remarkable–and probably profitable. By the time we made it to bed the rain had stopped and there wasn’t really any threat of flooding this time. I don’t know if there’s a lesson in all of this, but tonight we’re at a Holiday Park (private campground) doing laundry, enjoying a hot shower, and writing this here blog entry. I’m assuming we will actually sleep in the tent we have set up, but I suppose we’re ready for anything!
Check out all the new pics on Flickr–there’s a lot I haven’t written about here!
