Stocking Up, Bush Camping, and Water Rationing

Right after the previous post on the 11th, we left the Internet laundromat and walked up the street to the Billygoat Cafe, a small restaurant owned by Pauline, John's sister. When we were finished checking out the van in Auckland, John said we should stop by to say hi and have a bite to eat. We had a couple delicious desserts and a couple of great lattes--Kerrie was especially thrilled to know that we wouldn't have to be deprived of high-quality espresso while we were here. Thanks Pauline and John!

After our snack we went to the Warehouse (think Wal-Mart, but a bit smaller) to buy a few more necessities, and then to the grocery store to stock up on rations in earnest--we left Thames with new flip-flops for camp and with plenty of food to last for several days. We backtracked just a little bit and then went up a mostly-dirt side road into the Kaueranga Valley, which we had read about in our guide books. It's a beautiful gorge with a small, calm river running through the middle that is dotted with a bunch of small camp sites and well marked hikes.

We drove most of the way in and then started off on a short hike to the Tarawaere Dam. Unfortunately, we realized just as we set out that we weren't going to make it all the way through the hike before nightfall, so we set ourselves a time limit and turned around when we ran out of time. The overwhelming memory of the trail was the smell: a combination of flowers and the sweet musky scent of the forest. Kerrie said that it smelled a lot like cardamom.

After our hike, we went back down the road a bit and set up camp in a "bush camp," which is to say a campsite with no facilities except for a long drop toilet (a latrine) and a little fire pit for each site. The latrine was the best smelling one (which is to say it didn't smell) we had ever used. The bugs were pretty fierce, so we had to keep the van all closed up. The big event of the night was that we did a little laundry in the sink and managed to run out of water! Who knew that 40 liters would go so fast? We had enough to drink, but barely. We had to really conserve that night, but since you are reading this post you know that I did make it out alive. That's the problem with first person accounts: they always remove the suspense of possible death. Oh, yeah, Kerrie made it too.