Well apart from a few well timed moments, the rain didn't ease. It just came down in buckets. I got to Pipiriki, a few deserted houses and a lone lost Frenchwoman whose story I still havn't fathomed, was all I saw there. The country to get there was pretty but strange, huge clay cliffs and peaks that must have been the softest rock imaginable.
From Pipiriki the road went through a large bush area following the Wanganui river. Huge tree ferns, tall trees dripping with rain and cloud. The good tar sealed road gave way rather unexpectedly to a very rough gravel road with the worst corrugations imaginable - going in all directions at once. On flat land the best way of dealing with corrugations is speed - just hit the tops and dont go into the troughs, but here with wet clay and gravel on the surface, a water and clay filled ditch on one side, a ravine on the other and the narrow road twisting up and down steep hillsides that clearly wasn't the right option. The few local vehicles I passed were all going at a similar slow speed and they were all chunky 4x4's. Clearly a rented Toyota Corolla with automatic gear shift is not the vehicle of choice in these parts!
Driving for hours through such untouched bush one inevitably fixes on the human anomalies. A sign giving a temporary speed restriction of 30k in a place where more than 10 would be impossible anyway, and an open road limit of 100 km where more than 20 would have been suicidal, and the only cleared paddock in an hour of driving with a hand painted sign declaring No trespassers and Dogs will be shot. In one place lower in the valley and after regaining tarred road a washout was being fixed in the torrential rain . The workmen said I would have to wait about 15 minutes but they had to wake me up 50 minutes later when it was finally passable.
Connie spoke about all the Maori villages and canoes on the river but now there is just one Maori Paa, very friendly inviting visitors in, with just one large old canoe bow on display. It seems the only way of experiencing the river today is on a jet boat offering 30 min to 2 hour 30 min rides. The area will be far less populated now than then. Only the road signs in the softer lower parts of the valley indicating that some kind of settlement exists, I passed Athens, London and Jerusalem!
What this trip did remind me of is how many wild and remote places still exist in New Zealand within quite short distances of towns and major through roads. It is probably just this lack of adequate road networks that keeps them that way. I will happily suffer the bad roads.
As the weather got even worse I decided to head directly to Wellington, stopping at Levin on the way to visit my fathers grave for only the second time. The rain stopped while I was there and resumed again as I left.
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