North to South PIII
Zepher
Chris & Lyn Darch
Thu 6 Aug 2009 20:36
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It was up and att'am again the next morning, Jack
and myself armed with our snow gliding equipment set off to the ski fields of
Cadrona, it's a 50 km drive so we were away, even though Jack was in a semi
comatose state he had woken by the first hill climb some 20 km down the
road.
The climb to Cadrona was a blast, as we climbed up
from the valley the clear views over the lakes was great, Jack was doing the
gazing but I was more concerned with the road conditions, after climbing some
800 metres from the valley floor we were in the ice and snow, it levelled out
into a Plato which had the small village of Cadrona, a one horse town to say the
least, history has it that all these types of towns down here on the South
Island were old gold mining towns, left over from the late 1800's it was very
reminiscent of our drive some years ago with our friends Rob and Sharon from
Salt Lake to Nevada except much shorter .
Anyway after the Plato road we started to
climb , very Alpine type hairpin bends all the way up to 1200m passing the lower
ski lift station and up to the main base camp, its the first time I have driven
up above a lift station before , snow and ice crunching sounds could be heard as
we inched our way into the care park and slotted into the front of a large snow
drift, parking done we got out and donned our gear , off to the lifts and on
with the day's skiing, it was a cracker, clear skies and nice crisp snow, the
resort wasn't big but was very well managed and enough for a good day skiing
without the legs buckling below you at the end of the day .
Back to the truck by 15:00 Jacks thighs were
tired, apparently snow boarding is the opposite to surf boarding and although
Jack was a bit of a natural the new position was tiring on unused muscles, "ah
the utes of today" anyway I was still standing and not feeling to tired, must be
all that running up and down the hills of Wellington that's kept my fetlocks fit
.
After a considerable amount of de-icing we pulled
out of the snow drift and wound our way back down the mountain, by now the
roadways ice and snow had melted and was more of a mud track descending the side
of the mountain was more of a mud slide, driving conditions can be quite
challenging and the use of four wheel drives here makes sense, as opposed to the
city slickers and there "Welly Tractors".
Our appetites were large as we piled in to the
local Italian eating house, stuffed a large amounts of carbs then back to the
bat cave, well that's what it looked like, and to bed, I call it the bat cave as
it was a loft type of accommodation, Lyn and I were in the loft bit like a pair
of bats up in the ceiling space with 1.2 to 1.6 metres of space to the ceiling ,
we left Jack down in the lower bed, easy to get him out and about in his morning
" Lazerace trance " mode .
Next day the weather had closed in and Lyn's
fishing trip to the lake was off so we went to the Kiwi house, saw the little
buggers walking about in a large red light box, interesting little
creatures like baby ostriches digging around looking for bugs and worms in the
undergrown, apparently they are the only birds with there nostrils at the end of
there beak, plus they carry an egg almost as big as themselves .... its about
120mm long and about 70mm in circumference and once laid the kiwi
walks off as when the egg hatches the little kiwi comes out fighting with all
its survival senses active, the parent bird has no part in its upbringing,
the hard wired DNA imprint puts the little fella into action strait away,
pre white man times, before the introduction of stoats,whesels, rats and all
other manner of mammals to these shores the bird life flourished, in fact it was
so good a lot of the birds had lost the use of there wings and just ran
around the forest floors munching every little creepy crawly they could find,
the little rodents have put a stop to that and most of the bird that are
flightless are extinct or very nearly, they only now thrive on the out
laying islands.
After an interesting guided tour of the rest of the
establishment we had lunch and went to watch Bruno the movie , don't bother ! it
was pants a re-hash of the old Borat one .
After that we had a early night as the next
day we were off up the West coast to Franz Josef glacier .
To Be continued further in PT
VI
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