Wednesday, November 21, 2012

First stop: Waitaki Waters

We haven't been on a tenting holiday since 2007, when we camped in a number of place in the UK.   At that time I blogged about the trip day by day (pretty much); this time, on a trip around some of the South Island, I kept notes on an iPad, and will use these as a basis for posts relating to this most recent holiday.   We were trying to do the holiday as economically as possible, since neither of us are earning anything, and mostly survive on the superannuation.  I'm not sure that we entirely succeeded in this, but in general we kept expenses down.  Part of our expense-reducing process was reverting to the use of the tent for accommodation.  This was only partly successful, as you'll discover as you read on through these posts.

Many of the places mentioned won't be familiar to some readers, so I'll try and put links in to assist.


6.11.12 First day of the holiday.
The tent up, and ready for business with
the power cord attached to its pole. 
We'd decided to head for Waitaki Waters camp as our first port of call on the way to Christchurch (where we were due to attend a 60th birthday a few days later), and left home about 1.30 after a couple of false starts.  We stopped off at Waikouaiti beach where it was very sunny but there was a nasty chilly wind coming off the sea.  However it was good to have a break and I dozed for a few minutes, which I needed - I'd had quite a busy morning taking someone to the Eye Department at the Hospital.  I don't know that we've ever been to that part of the beach before, only the part down by the racetrack.  It's certainly lovely and would be a good spot when the wind wasn't so fierce.

The manager/owner at Waitaki Waters is Australian though he sounds English; seemingly a lot of people have commented on this.  His father is Australian born but his mother was Eastern European, which maybe has given his speech a bit of a tang.  The camp-site is beautifully clean and tidy; probably one of the best I've seen in this regard.  We camped on a fairly spacious bit of ground - there weren't many people staying - and got the tent up fairly easily, considering we're rather out of practice.  It was very hot by this stage and I thought it was going to be stuffy sleeping in the tent but in fact even with sleeping bags and a blanket each we were both cold on and off during the night.

We met a German couple while they were making their dinner.  The man's English was very good, and we talked about places we'd been in Germany, though I had to think hard to remember which ones they were!  Celia was very tired and was in bed by 8.30 at least.  I read for a while until the moths attacking the tent trying to get at the light got too annoying.  We'd walked the 800 metres down to the beach and found that an enormous bank of river pebbles had been deposited there. Our assumption was that they were to keep the sea from swamping the place.  There must have been tens of millions of them and we presumed they'd all been brought in a truckload at a time.  The tide was high and crashed up against them.

However, I discovered later, in Geraldine, that these pebbles are natural and have always been there. They may have been shored up a bit to keep the tides at bay, but otherwise that's a naturally pebbly beach.  The person who told me this, a volunteer working on the riverside garden in Geraldine, said he was originally from a place further south where they had sandy beaches (as we do in Dunedin, of course), which he much preferred. He also made the interesting remark, in relation the flooding of the river in Geraldine – which was what he was helping to clean up – that every town with a river has a history.  I can believe it, especially if the river is only metres away from the shops and other buildings.

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