Saturday March 25, 2020 - Te Mahia to Kaikoura

 

It felt good to have a "goof off" couple of days, but now it's time to wrap this trip up. We return the car on Monday afternoon and fly out Tuesday morning bright and early from Christchurch. Deb found a place for two nights in Kaikoura, down the east coast. 

But first we have to get back to the car. We packed up and dropped our bag off with Trevor, the owner, by 9 am so they had plenty of time to drive it over the hill to the dock. They will carry bags but not you, a liability thing? But in this case it is a pleasant 50 minute walk with a last panoramic view of the bay and mountains where Te Mahia lives. We did find out that before last August, 90% of their visitors drove to Te Mahia but the storms washed out the road to the point where only the locals are allowed to wiggle in and out on what is left of the road. We had assumed it was the 2021 storms we had heard about over the last few days.

Checkout was at 10 and the boat was meeting us at 11:30 so no time pressure walking over. We met a walking group of women (it always seems to be women walking, note to you lonely single guys out there, get walking!) who were walking the entire Queen Charlotte track. We also ran into a batch of 40-50 year old men on mountain bikes who were biking the Queen Charlotte Track. We got to the dock plenty early and around 11:15 the Te Mahia summer helper, Frank, arrived with the old beat up diesel Toyota Tacoma with a flat bed (the official vehicle of all Kiwi men) and our bag.

The boat arrived a few minutes late but sitting on a dock with panoramic views on a nice day means, no worries on schedule. We were hoping for the comedy team to take us back but this is a smaller boat that only had the skipper and one other passenger. We got back to Picton in under an hour and put our gear in the car and then found a sandwich shop for lunch. Picton was a lot less busy than when we were here the other day, probably because there was no cruise ship at the dock.

There is only one road down the east coast, RT 1, which is a 2 laner with a few passing lanes or wide spots to pull off and let faster cars and trucks go by. Most of the 2-3 hours was spent right on the ocean with no development and part of it was driving through the Marlborough district vineyards. Lots of wine made here with these specialized machines to do whatever it is they have to do to grapes. The industry has standardized the shape of the vines so these machines do all the work. We saw very few people working so they seem to have automated everything.

We noticed that RT 1 had a lot of pretty new and fancy bridges and the train tracks, which run next to it, were pretty spit and polished as well. I read later that there was a huge earthquake in 2016 and the road and train was destroyed. It took them a year to rebuild and over $1 billion dollars. Thus the new roads.

We found the AirBnB easily and then took a drive through town to get a lay of the land. Kaikoura was a whaling station way back in the early 1800's until the whales were depleted, then was a fishing village until the lobsters and fish were depleted, then turned to tourism (until the tourists are depleted?). Now it has 2000 people or so and lots of tourists. But they have a huge long black sandy beach (very tiny black rocks) and are set up to cash in on their location. Tourism started with the Moari building a small boat and offering whale watching tours back in the 1960s. Now they have anything you want to do, kind of like the rest of New Zealand .

We went to The Whaler Bar and Restaurant where we split Green Lipped Mussels, a bowl of chowder and a salad. And a couple of pints of course. After dinner we found the New World grocery store and picked up a few things for our last few days. Then back to the ranch and bed.