Another (But Stormy) Spectacular Day

As packed as Monday was, Tuesday turned out to be just as spectacular. We woke up in our Karamea camp site to the sound of rain. Clearly, it had been raining most of the night and showed no signs of letting up. We decided to head back into the Oparara Basin anyway because our main destination was a couple of caves that are open for exploring so we figured we'd be out of the rain. When we got back into the basin we were stymied by some work being done on a bridge, so we couldn't get all the way to the caves. The rain had calmed to a intermittent drizzle, so we hiked to the other limestone arch in the area, called Moria's Gate. With all of the Lord of the Rings filming sites scattered about New Zealand I was taken with the coincidence, but it really appears there's no relation (unless Tolkien saw the name and borrowed it for his dwarven kingdom or a geologist who had read the book named the arch.)

Once in the forest, we were shielded by what rain there still was. The hike was a pleasent half-hour jaunt, and the arch was spectacular. To get into the arch we had to climb down about ten feet into a cave which meets up with the river that carved the arch. I took way too many pictures, and it was hard to choose the ones that gave the best sense of the size and beauty of the arch. The first is from inside the arch looking out and the second is out along the river looking through to the other side. In both pictures the cave we entered in is to the right inside the archway.




By the time we got back to the car, the bridge was freed up and we headed up the basin to the carpark for Box Canyon Cave and Crazy Paving Cave. The two caves are right next to each other and only about a 10 minute walk from the car. They're both "wet" caves, which means water is still flowing in them actively creating new formations. We swapped our waterproof hats for some headlamps and headed in. Crazy Paving Cave has an interesting cracked floor, and is most notible in that it includes a colony of some of New Zealands largest spiders! The spiders were no where to be seen, but we saw several of their egg sacks hanging away from the walkway. Box Canyon Cave is much larger and deeper, and felt a lot more like the dictionary definition of "cave". At spots, the ceiling was 30 more feet high, and there were a bunch of side passages with interesting crevices and crannies. I managed to get a couple of photos by setting up the camera on my mini tripod and taking a 30 second exposure while Kerrie and I swept our headlamps back and forth across the rocks. It worked like a charm!

The formations in the picture above are at least 20 feet tall, and we were far enough into the cave that without our headlamps the cave was absolutely dark. If we weren't moving, there was no sound at all except for the rare sound of a drop of water falling. When we came out of the caves, it was raining much harder so we dashed back to the van to head back to the highway. The rain was coming down hard within a few minutes so the trek back out on the dirt road seemed to stretch on. We put on "America: The Book: The Audiobook" and laughed our way through to the highway. As we headed south, the weather worsened and we pelted with sheets of rain. Kerrie was driving and said that the wind wasn't so bad (see White Knuckled Driving below) but the rain just kept coming down. At one point, there was a break in the storm and we happened upon a scenic overlook where we could see the wind-driven waves coming in. We could see the wind blowing spray off the top of the cresting waves and the waves exploding when they hit the rocks. Shortly after we were treated to a thick rainbow during another break in the clouds. The picture below doesn't really show the storm, but Kerrie and I both liked the shot curved beach with the breaking clouds above.


Further down the highway we stopped on an impulse for a sign that advertised, "Pancake Rocks and Blowhole" which also turned out to be spectacular. The pancake rocks are sedimentary rocks that have particularly defined layers and have eroded to look a bit like stacked pancakes. The whole area has been carved away by the surf to create caves and holes for the surf to flow through. We were again lucky to catch a break in the rain to go look, but we both froze as the wind picked up sea spray and drove it into our bones. It's impossible with just a few shots to give a good idea of what it looked like, but this picture gives a good idea of how stormy the seas were. The waves were pounding into the rocks every few seconds--at one point we saw some foam picked up by the wind and blown away like bubbles.



This shot gives an overview of what the different formations looked like. The pancakes that were everwhere were like the formations on the left of the picture.