I’m up early so, sneak out to see the sunrise. It’s a clear, cold morning. The tide now appears fully in and the water is calm as anything. Did I say cold, it’s about 4°
I had thought about heading further north to Collingwood or maybe further, but it would only be for the sake of going to the northern most point. It’s a 200+km round trip dead end as we’d need to come back to here to continue on. At least French pass was pretty scenic.
We do take a 10km detour out to a place call “The Riwaka Resurgence”, an underground stream that surfaces here to become the Riwaka river. It’s so cold and frosty out here this morning, but it’s a nice short walk and the river is pretty nice.
A quick stop at a swing bridge in the Motueka valley, over the river for a bit of exercise. Then the Hope Saddle lookout.
We take a short side trip to Mauria Falls. Apparently the falls where created about a century ago when an earthquake caused a huge mountain slip. This blocked the old river and it re-routed itself over these falls.
As we head towards the west coast we’re following the Buller River and come across a section of single lane road carved out of the side of the cliff at Lower Buller Gorge. It’s pretty amazing.
Then onto Westport, which is a slightly bigger town than I expected. There is a freecamp out by the beach just outside the town, we take a visit, and it’s kinda in the dunes, the sand look soft and a motorhome is not a 4×4. It also looks pretty average. There is another option a few k’s north of town, we take a visit out on spec. It’s just a single parking spot at the end of a beach access road. This doesn’t sound nice, but it’s actually great. We end up parking right on the edge of the beach.
This is completely out of the way. There is just so much atmosphere here! We’ve got this beautiful, rugged, isolated beach pretty much to ourselves, in the afternoon, we only see a jogger and someone walking a dog.
The kids have a ball, and we tell them to run and yell and scream as much as they like, which they don’t need too much encouragement.
