The 2 weeks break from my 2 month holiday was very nice. Christmas eating with my family, and New Years drinking with my friends. On the 1st of January, after ringing in the New Year in Otamure Bay, north of Whangarei, it was time to start the Southern leg of my journey. Five hours back home, do some washing, sleep, get up, then another ten and a half hours to Wellington, along which I searched for both the Ngaruawahia and Tokoroa tearooms, to no avail, and stopped off at the Gumboot Manor Tearoooms in Taihape (you can read more about the Gumboot Manor Family Restaurant and Steakhouse, I mean Tearooms, in the Tearooms journal). We arrived, my girlfriend Bridget has now joined me, at night and went straight to sleep. The morning couldn’t come quicker as my niece, Mia, decided it would be a smashing idea to cry her 7-month old lungs out for pretty much the entire night.
We had a quick breakfast, then headed for the ferry. Our check-in was at 7:25am, so we left the house at 7am. Fifteen minutes to get there, ten minutes to spare. I managed to shave off those unnecessary ten minutes by neglecting to read the map, jumping straight back on SH 1, and being forced to drive all the way to Johnsonville, get off, get back on, and then drive back to the ferry. We still arrived in time for them not to turn us away, in all likelihood with about half an hour to spare.
We were guided onto the ferry, parked up, switched on the alarm, caught the elevator to the 7th floor, read the sign about not leaving your alarm on in case the cars move and it goes off, caught the elevator back to the car, switched off the alarm and repeated step 4. I quickly noticed that in attempting to create some sort of capitalist Titanic, the makers of our vessel, the Kaitaki, had installed too many shops and food outlets, and mistakenly forgot to include adequate seating for all the passengers. Perhaps I am being too hard on them, there may well have been enough seating had other passengers not had the anti-social notion to use the seat next to theirs as temporary baggage storage, despite a number of announcements on the PA asking passengers to refrain from doing precisely this. In saying that, we found a couple of seats side-by-side almost instantly. But I did observe that others following us were not so lucky. We held onto these seats long enough to witness a magic show that makes David Copperfield look like…well, David Copperfield. A bendy wand, hilarious. At least the kids loved him.
Despite Bridget putting up a fight, as well as a very sound argument that we would almost definitely lose our seats, we headed up onto the sun deck to bask in the irony of the name while sheltering ourselves from the miserable, overcast, freezing cold weather. There was only so much irony we could take, so we headed back down to find our seats had been taken. And so we sat on the over-sized window sills, which are nearly the best seats in the house, waiting for the EFTPOS to come back online so I could get a coffee. It did, and I did.
Soon after another trip up to the irony deck to watch as we sailed through the Marlborough Sounds and into Picton, we heard the call to go back to our cars. I was surprised at how quickly they got the cars off, and how much madness quickly ensued as I tried to pick a car to follow since road markings were nowhere to be seen. A nice bone density testing truck led me out into the heart of Picton, which we navigated through to get to a park for Palin to run around in. He had been locked in a swaying car for three and a half hours after all. A track leading from the park around the harbour took us to some pretty amazing views of Picton, and then back around Bob’s Bay, which I can honestly say is as grand as the name it bears.
A somewhat vacant young man, who clearly held no regard for the job he held, served us at the supermarket as we stocked up for the week, after which we headed off in search of the Rarangi DOC campsite. It was clearly labelled on my trusty atlas, so I foresaw no major issues. We found Rarangi and stopped off to let Palin run around on the beach, and to double-check my atlas. According to the little blue tent, the campground was past the town, along a dirt road. So we hopped back in the car and headed along the road that lead away from the town. It was windy and steep, and scared Bridget to the point of telling me. At the end of the sealed road we came to a DOC campground, but this one was not dog friendly. The atlas had told us Rarangi was on a dirt road, so we continued onto the dirt road. I have never been so shaken in my life, and I mean that physically. The road was covered in so many of those tiny bumps that dirt roads get, I could feel my eyeballs vibrating from side to side like an old cartoon. Bridget on the other hand was shaken emotionally, and quite a bit so. The cliff on one side didn’t help, and neither did the fact that every now and then the bumping would cause the back to lose all traction. After about 10kms of this, which was a long time since I was forced to travel at around 20kph, we realised we saw another DOC campground. If you can call it that. It was really a grass parking lot with something that resembled a long drop. The name, Robin Hood Bay, sounded nothing like Rarangi, and so we consulted the atlas. We noticed that we were about 5kms past the point where the Rarangi campground was supposed to be. We didn’t feel like staying on the side of the road, unlabelled DOC campground or not, and so headed back along the jolting dirt road for another look, with the back-up plan that we would continue on to Blenheim if necessary.
Part way along I noticed another dirt road leading off to the right. I had seen it before, but the sign said nothing of a campground, so I drove past the first time. This time I figured it was worth a look. A couple of kilometres of even dodgier, steeper dirt road and one absolutely petrified girlfriend later, I figured I was not going to stumble across a campground. Pity, as I was having a great time, something that did the petrifaction of Bridget no good. Never before have I performed a riskier, higher altitude 3-point turn. I was comforted by the fact that there was very little chance of any traffic coming the other way. Before heading back down the hill I had to pull over to the side to make way for a very off-roady looking 4WD coming the other way, but then I was off and back in Rarangi before you could say “I am very rapidly losing faith in my increasingly inaccurate touring atlas”. We pulled into the Rarangi car park for lunch, as it was close to 3pm. I then noticed something I had seen before. A DOC campground registration post. Would you have guessed it, here was the Rarangi DOC campground all along. We had driven for the last hour, shaking lose every screw and bolt in my truck, for nothing. In many ways you can’t blame us. For one, my atlas mislead me. I will need to be more cautious of it in future. Secondly, the Rarangi DOC campground is very cleverly disguised as a gravel carpark. At this point, we didn’t care. We picked a spot on the gravel and paid our fees.
The South Island leg of my New Zealand-wide journey had got off to a tiresome, action-packed start. If this is a sign of things to come, I fear both my girlfriend and the structural integrity of my truck will need to toughen up.
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