On-the-Road Tales

Stopped off at Nelson Lakes to do a walk. Lovely place. Mountainous and rugged. We moved onto Buller Gorge which is split into an upper and lower gorge. The terrain is a bit rough and the roads are basic. Most of the bridges are single lane since there is not alot of traffic in this unpopulated stretch. The gorge narrows in some places and the driver showed us how high it floods during particularly bad storms, completely submerging roads. The people are really at the mercy of weather in this part of the world. We stopped off at Buller Adventure and I signed up to go jetboating. Again – a crazy invention only a kiwi would think of. A farmer wanted to get up to check out his cattle in an area of a shallow river. So he designed a boat sans props that worked off a pump thrust system – these were up out of the water so it could run on as little as 3 cm of depth. The concept took hold and soon it was being produced in NZ. Tourism people recognized the potential to spin tourists around with the directional thrust and thus I was forking over money to go skim over the water.

We loaded into the boat on a farm and Doc, the skipper, got into the tractor and pulled us the 15 minutes down to the river bank. We cruised 22 km up the river while Doc pointed out fish and relayed various historical facts. Then we raced back down doing 360 degree skids and turns, narrowly avoiding rock walls, and submerging under waterfalls – successfully drenching most of us.

We continued on that day and pulled into Bazils in Westport for the evening.

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 3:44 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.