Today our plan is to head north from Karamea and view some natural arches in Oparara which is located in Kahurangi National Park. The road to Oparara begins about 5kms north of Karamea and as we were driving on it this day, the road was freshly graded... really freshly graded. 1/2 of the road was graded with the other half that was not grated separated by a continuous mound of gravel.
It was about 10 mins on this narrow road that we came upon the grader, that was actually sitting half in a muddy ditch and half on the road. I asked if the driver needed any assistance, but he said he was fine and had a radio if he had to use it. He suggested that we squeeze by him and squeezing by was challenging enough, given that there was debris on the road and a soft wet ditch on the other side. We safely got by, but could have pictured the worst case scenario of a major traffic jam on this road in the middle of nowhere.
We arrived at the first parking lot that has many of the tracks heading into Oparara. We parked and got ready for a nice short tramp into the rain forest to view the first arch called Moria Gate Arch, a little Lord of the Rings lore exists here. This was unlike the other forests we had seen in New Zealand. It really felt like we were in a jungle.
We only had to walk for about 15 mins before coming to a hole in the limestone, descending down under the massive slab of limestone, walking out to the river and realizing that the formation above you was formed from the water eroding the rock you walked through.
It was quite impressive!
We explored the arch and the eroded features of the limestone, including stalagmites growing from the ceiling.
Moria Arch was impressive...
wish I had gotten some better shots however.
Next we were off to Oparara Arch, the track to it leads away from the same parking lot but travels in an opposite direction to Moria Arch.
It took about 20 minutes to reach the arch and there is a natural bridge high above the entrance to the arch and it is equally impressive to see.
The Oparara arch is 200 metres in length, 49 metres wide and 37 metres high!
We stopped back at the parking lot to have lunch and feed the weka some of our pretzels. They were really curious here and came right up to you. Likely from others feeding them so I thought why not. The only problem with the place was the sandflies! They were fierce here and were bugging us terribly to the point we were racing to get out of here. It was hot and the sandflies were settling nicely into our campervan since we had the windows open. We packed up and drove a long time with the windows down attempting to get the sandflies out our our van.
From here we drove all the way to Abel Tasman, stopping for dinner at a pub in Murchison. It was a little wet in the mountains and there is one crazy windy stretch after Murchison that must be handled carefully. It was a tad slippery and the campervan liked to lock up on one of the front wheels for extra excitement. We drove all the way to The Barn backpackers, but it was late and I thought it would be better to sleep in a hotel for the night, so we could wash out sheets the next day and not worry about the sandfly attack planned for the evening. So, our first motel was a nice luxory unit in Motueka with sky tv and all the furnishings. Tegan relished the idea of having a TV and we watched a few shows before calling it a night. Oh ya, the milk! When you get a room in New Zealand you given a choice of milk for coffee or milk for cereal. I didn't know what the lady was talking about at first, but we selected our cereal milk and viewed our room. We also we told to just pay the owners in the morning... very trusting... but they had all my info anyway.
