Fathers Day- Napier

Real-time

An added bonus of being back in Napier was that we could share Fathers Day with Dad, and treat Mum & Dad out to lunch at a very popular restaurant on the outskirts of Taradale- the Puketapu Hotel. Or as we've always called it, the Puketap' pub. The Puketapu Hotel is a member of the NZ Classic Pubs and a winner of the 2011 Hawkes Bay Hospo Awards which is one of the reasons it's so popular.

Puketapu was once a major crossroads and staging post, where stage and mail coaches, horse and bullock trains met up before branching off on their journeys to Taihape, Rissington, Puketitiri, Taupo, Wairoa and Gisborne.

Puketapu is also a very familiar area to us. When we were young, Mum and us kids spent nearly every weekend over summer at a swimming hole in the Tutaekuri River just up the road. As teenagers we'd also drive our friends out to the swimming hole for the day. Back then the pub was a typical rough and ready country pub. We only had eyes on the country store, it's where we'd fill up on supplies of iceblocks, chippies and fizzy drink- if we had enough pocket money.

Another reason the pub and restaurant are so popular is that Puketapu is at the top of one of the equally popular Hawkes Bay Cycle Trails, the Puketapu Loop, and is a good stopping point for lunch and/or refreshments. The trail starts in Napier (33kms return) but can be ridden from Taradale (18km return) up one side of the river and back down the other. 

Every weekend there is a continuous stream of lycra clad cyclists passing through or stopping for a breather, along with family groups and on this Sunday, a group of enthusiastic Art Deco period costume cyclists who arrived in dribs and drabs depending on their pedal power and lung capacity.

Although the guy on the penny farthing arrived with the first group and quickly disappeared into the garden bar for refreshments!

I'd booked a table earlier in the week, which was just as well as both the restaurant and bar were fully booked. The Garden Bar was also very busy as they have a 'Sunday Session' with live music two weekends a month.

We had a very enjoyable afternoon and we'd all thoroughly recommend the restaurant. There was a special Fathers Day menu but many of the dishes appear on their regular menu also. We all had the King Prawn & Shrimp Cocktail topped with Rose Marie Sauce. It was so delicious I forgot to take a photo! The prawns were chargrilled and warm and placed on top of the shrimps which made for an interesting combination and something a little different from the usual cold prawn cocktail.

Mum and I had the Pork Belly, David had Marinated Lamb Rump and Dad had the Lemon Parmesan Crumbed Beef Schnitzel and everyone was pleased with their choice.

The Puketapu is also a meeting place for Sunday run bikers...

...and their passengers, although it looks like this guy lost his! 

We had a wander past, admiring the line up of bikes... 

...and checking out the Model A truck across the road before heading for home, fully replete and ready for a Nana nap! 

And just a small note to mark a milestone- this is my 600th blog post. That's a bloody lot of typing and photo taking!

Plenty of Pylons – Lake Tennyson

After we left Banks Peninsula we spent another couple of days back at the NZMCA Park in Weedons, Christchurch before once again hitting the road heading north. If we keep this up we’re not going to make Nelson before spring!

Our next stop was Hanmer Springs, the alpine resort village in North Canterbury. David had a special birthday to celebrate & I thought it would be nice to have a bit of time relaxing at the hot pools and David could also have a massage; he’s been missing his regular weekly massage that he used to have back in Tauranga. I forgot that it was school holidays! Chaos reigned. But I’ll come to that blog later.

To escape the masses we took a drive out to Lake Tennyson. Lake Tennyson is located 40km from Hanmer, on the well known Rainbow Road, a 112km wilderness 4WD road trip through sub-alpine country. The road starts behind Hanmer Springs and exits at the Nelson Lakes passing first through Molesworth Station, the huge (well in fact the largest) station in New Zealand & then Rainbow Station. This is not to be confused with the 207km Acheron Road which also traverses Molesworth Station and is the more well known journey. Both roads are closed over winter, the access gates locked from April to December although the Rainbow Road gate is much closer to St Arnard (Nelson Lakes) so you can travel it from Hanmer for about 76kms (as long as there is no snow)

Right behind Hanmer Village are two passes that take you over the Hanmer Range into the Clarence River Valley. Jacks Pass is the more popular route to take, Jollies Pass is only recommended for 4WD. We thought we’d take Jacks on the way over & Jollies on the way back. Jacks Pass was deeply corrugated, one of the worst gravel roads we’ve struck in our travels. David wonders how often they grade it, as going by the traffic we pass, it's a well used road. There are dozens of forest & mountain cycle & walking tracks on the range and we see plenty of cars with bikes of all sizes piled up on bike racks behind the cars or on trailers and roofs. The Hanmer Skifield is also over the range and up near the St James Conservation Area but as there has been hardly any snow this winter, it’s hasn’t opened yet.



Jacks Pass

Just before we pull over at the top of the Pass we come across a hiker with his Golden Retriever beside him, walking down the road. I recognise that it’s Mark Inglis, the well known mountaineer that lost both his legs after they became frost bitten while he was trapped in a snow cave on Mt Cook for 13 days back in 1982. He had his carbon fibre prosthetic legs on and looked to be managing the corrugations better than David did. I know he lives in Hanmer & is training for another overseas mountaineering expedition at the moment. He has a quest spot on Radio New Zealand quite often.



Heading down the Jacks Pass to the Clarence Valley

Once over the top we follow the Clarence River along Tophouse Road towards the old St James homestead & the start of the St James Cycle Trail. And we’re back into tussock grasslands, one of my favourite landscapes. The old rabbit proof fence borders  the road, there’s more about it further on.

We really are so lucky in New Zealand. There are so many wonderful walking, tramping & cycling tracks around NZ & especially out in the remote back country. It’s just a shame that there aren’t more people who can access some of these awesome trails. The 65km two day St James Cycle Trail (more of a mountainbike run looking at some of the route) is located in the St James Conservation Area, along with a number of other trails, there are also natural hot springs located near the trail at a couple of points which would be great for those over worked muscles.

St James Conservation Area covers 78,000 ha of native beech forest, tussock plains, rivers, lakes & mountains. It was once one of the largest operating cattle/sheep stations in the country & was purchased by the government in 2008 to protect it & open it up to recreation & tourism.

The cycle trail starts and finishes at Maling Pass or St James Station Homestead. We stop at the entrance to the old St James Station to have a look at the abandoned buildings left behind, including the woolshed, stables, cook house and the remains of the old homestead.

Going by the amount of old dog kennels scattered around underneath the gnarly old macrocapa shelterbelt they had a lot of farm dogs on this station.

And the farm dogs obviously had as hard a life as the settlers on this remote and rugged station.

We carry on up the road heading towards snow capped mountains with the weather looking like its about to close in on us. Other than two cars (without people) in the St James carpark we pass no one else until we return to Hanmer.

Two rows of pylons march down the river valley, here the wires catch the sun looking like a giant spider has passed through ahead of us.

Looking back to St James & the good weather.

A Pylon montage! I know that pylons are usually unsightly but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. These photos wouldn’t be as interesting without them.

The historic Fowlers Pass Track hut sits just off the road, a section of the cycle/tramping track runs up the valley from here.

Fowlers Pass (1296m) connects Fowlers Hut with Stanley Vale & Lake Guyon huts. The track has river crossings, scree slopes & in winter snow can make travel difficult. The area is also prone to avalanches. So not your average Sunday ride or walk.

The road we are on is reasonable, though there are a few repaired patches where the river, in flood, has come sweeping around a corner and washed it away. There’s also a high section that has been cut through a gravel slope, big rocks are scattered over it and we hope none decide to dislodge while we’re passing through.

Near the Maling Pass section of the St James Cycle Trail (the other start/finish point) we open the gate and enter Molesworth Station crossing the Clarence River for the first time.  This photo is actually taken on our way back out.

Not long afterwards we turn onto a track that will take us to Lake Tennyson. It’s a nice surprise to see that there’s a shelter with a table & bench that we can have lunch at. David (Stickman) first checks out the river to see if there are any trout, this is the Clarence River outlet from the lake.

Lake Tennyson is quite beautiful even though shrouded in rain and cloud,  it’s surrounded by tussock & alpine ground cover with a few stands of beech forest on the far shoreline. It’s a surprise to see a number of shags resting on a log on the lake edge just across the outlet & to hear ever-present & noisy Spur-winged Plovers kicking up a fuss at our arrival.

Inside the shelter there are a number of information boards.

Most of them tell about the struggle the area has had with rabbits. How the owner of Molesworth Station introduced wagonloads of cats he brought in from Christchurch, to try & control the rabbits. And that rabbits were the direct reason that Molesworth Station was returned to the crown in 1938. And all about 128km Waiau Rabbit Fence was “one of the most perfect rabbit fences in the world” (that’s the one I mentioned back at the top). I hope you can read some of the information, click on the photo to see a larger version.

Curried Rabbit anyone?

As we have our lunch the cloud lifts and the light rain stops, the lake becomes a millpond and we can now see the rugged slopes on the mountains behind. But it’s getting cold and it’s time to head home.

We weave our way back down the valley through the multitude of pylons and back into sunny weather.

We carry on past Jacks Pass and try our luck over Jollies Pass back to Hanmer. We had a bit of a laugh as we approached and saw where one row of pylons disappeared over the range. A very long time ago, we did a trip to the West Coast on the trans-alpine rail car, we hired a 4WD SUV and drove back to Christchurch via Lewis Pass, stopping at Hanmer for a few days.

We drove over Jacks Pass to look at the river and thought we’d return via Jollies Pass. Back then I don’t think the signage was a good as it is nowadays because just below this row of pylons there was a track which we thought must have been the pass, we’d been told it was 4WD only. We followed it up & up, I know it doesn’t look that steep from here, but believe me when you’re in the passenger seat looking straight down off the edge of a narrow mountain track with many washouts, it’s very scary.

The track got narrower, the rocks bigger & the ruts deeper. There was nowhere to turn around so we had to keep going. It was with some relief that the track finally ran out beneath a pylon right up on top & there was a small flat area full of rocks that we managed to turn around in and head back down. We decided Jacks Pass was all we could manage. It wasn’t until we were talking to a person at the information centre that we learnt we’d followed a pylon service track, a track that was only suitable for quad bikes. What greenhorns!

Today we drove on past the now overgrown pylon track and found the Jollies Pass track further on, we’d been told it was icy & slippery but we found most of it was fine, with a few slippery sections on the Hanmer side. It was, in fact, a lot smoother to cross than the corrugated Jacks Pass.

The view over the Hanmer Basin with Hanmer Springs village centre right.

Crossing Jollies Pass with a patchwork of forestry operations going not too far from Hanmer.

Horseshoe Bend & the Lonely Graves

The next day we decided to do a tiki-tour to the little settlement of Beaumont which is 35kms further down the river and where one of the very few bridges crosses the mighty Clutha.

Before we left I dove up the river to get a photo of the Roxburgh Bridge.

Now that we have been following the river downstream from its outlet back at Lake Wanaka I’ve discovered that most of the bridges are historic and usually painted in either red or blue. By my count there are only 13 opportunities to cross the river in it’s entire 338km length. One of these is a dam wall (Roxburgh), another a suspension bridge for foot traffic only & one other that I’ll keep as a surprise.

So far I have taken photos of 11 of the crossings; of the two that I have missed, one is on a main road to the West Coast, back in Albertown which we will cross again at some stage & the other (at Beaumont) was covered in scaffolding and didn’t look that photogenic. Hopefully we’ll pass over that again sometime in the future and then I’ll have the full set!

The Roxburgh Bridge, like the Alexandra Bridge has the old piers of the original bridge nearby, in fact two sets of remains, one on either side of the new bridge.The remains in the right hand photo are of the 1875 bridge. After looking for the build dates of the earlier bridges I came across this information, very interesting-

“Bridging the Clutha was a considerable challenge, which became clear in the great flood of 1878. The Bannockburn bridge on the Kawarau River was swept away, and its wreckage destroyed the Clyde bridge on the Clutha, which in turn ruined the Roxburgh bridge, a laminated wooden arch, only erected in 1875. Further downstream the Beaumont bridge was washed away and it in turn destroyed the Balclutha bridge.”

By driving to Beaumont we would be able to follow the road down the north side of the river (the true left), cross over at the Beaumont Bridge and come back to Roxburgh via the main state highway. The very new & very impressive Clutha Gold Cycle & Walking Trail also follows this same loop, the cycle trail is a continuation of the Roxburgh Gorge trail I talked about in the previous post. They are pretty impressive trails and have had a lot of money spent on them. The track ran past Pinders Pond, between us & the river, and although its out of season at the moment, we saw quite a number of people using it.

The track follows some of the old rail corridor through the Teviot Valley & the Beaumont Gorge with all new bridges over any creeks & streams, there’s plenty of signage, fencing & gates down both sides of any farmland it passes through, tiny cattle stops & cyclist sized Give Way signs at each outlet back onto the road.

There are a number of historic buildings & places to stop at along the trail. Many of the buildings are left over from the railway including the Teviot NZR goods shed and this old water tower just along the road from Pinders Pond.

Two more historic places I had marked down to check out were the Lonely Graves & the restored Horseshow Suspension Bridge both near the old Horseshoe Bend gold diggings. It’s actually quite a drive to visit both these sites, it wasn’t so bad for us as we were exploring along the road anyway but if you planned to visit from the main road as you were passing through you have to cross over at either Beaumont or Millers Flat and travel along a narrow gravel road for a good few kilometres. The Beaumont end is especially narrow & isolated as you’ll see further down.

The Lonely Graves have quite a story behind them. The story goes (& there is dispute of how true this is) that in 1864, William Rigney found a shivering dog beside the dead body of a young man. The police were notified but nobody claimed the body. Rigney dug the grave and the many of the men from the diggings attended the funeral. The pine slab with these words burned on- “Somebody’s Darling Lies Buried Here” marked the grave (it’s now inside a glass case attached to a second headstone).  When Rigney died in 1912 he was buried alongside as he had wished. His stone was engraved- “Here lies William Rigney, the man that buried Somebody’s Darling”. How wonderful is that & I’d like to think its entirely true! It’s kind of romantic too. I wonder what happened to the dog.

Very near the graves is the fully restored Horseshoe Bend suspension bridge which was built in 1913 at the narrowest part of the Clutha in this area. It was to replace an old pulley chair that was at the time the only way for the children of Horseshoe Bend to cross the river to attend school. It must have been terrifying sitting in a rickety old chair as it was pulled across the mighty Clutha with it’s deep water & foreboding swirling currents below.

The bridge was also used by farmers to get stock across the river and is now the only remaining suspension bridge on the river. It is 70 metres long & swings 75 metres above the river. We only had a short walk to the bridge from our side but there is an hour long walk to it from the main highway on the other side.

Back on the road we continued on towards Beaumont, the road, while still ok, looked a little less travelled and the area more remote. We had a bit of Mexican stand off when we came across this bull. He was reluctant to move from his mates on the other side of the fence. He backed off with his head down at one stage and then took off ahead of us down the centre of the road which was fenced close on both sides. We tried it slow so he could turn & run back past us; that didn’t work, we tried it fast; he could run faster, we tried it stopped & he just stood & looked at us. In the end he trotted behind a road side bush and we zoomed past before he could emerge on the other side. Later we passed a learner driver heading his way & wondered what the stand off would be like for them.

"Halt who goes there?!"

We hadn’t realised that it was quite so back country & in fact it’s lucky we didn’t have the fifth-wheeler on the back as we soon realised we’d have had to turn around (if we could have found a turning point, they were few & far between) and drive all the way back the way we came especially when we got to the very narrow Tallaburn Bridge. There would have been no way the fifth-wheeler could have squeezed through here. The bridge has actually been built over the metal supports of the old railbridge. No wonder it is so narrow.

Finally we reached the end of the road where we stopped briefly at the Beaumont Hotel to check out the camp site facilities, it’s listed in our directory & was recommended by a fellow “full time on the roader”. It looked ok and had the added benefit of drinks & meals available in the pub but we decided we’d head further on down the road when it came time to move.

We headed back home along SH8 stopping at Millers Flat to take a photo of another baby blue bridge over the Clutha.

We also stopped for afternoon tea in a lovely reserve beside the river and across the road from this long abandoned shop which is now beside the much bigger Four Square store. I liked the look of Mr Four Square on the roof of the shed behind the store. He looked right out of place thumbing a lift atop an old garage.

Then it was back to Pinders Pond in time to catch some more reflections before the sun went down.