It was fourteen miles before a car came up behind us and we pulled over to let it by, and really in 160 miles to Fox Glacier we saw very little traffic. At Makarova, we passed a family taking refuge in a cafe as their large RV had gone in to a ditch at the side of the road. It looked to me as if he might have pulled over to let something faster by and misjudged what space he had, scary!
As we drew closer to the west coast the landscape changed to resemble the Fiordland National Park we had driven through to Milford Sound with Cameron Flats looking like Knob Flat. I spotted several interesting creek names en route: Camp Creek; Waterfall Creek; Trickle Creeks (very narrow clefts in the rock but with the water roaring rather than trickling through). Once in the Haast Pass the waterfalls were hurtling down the hillsides. We passed one creek with a submerged car in it! There were huge amounts of water pouring off the hillsides but the thankfully the engineering works and culverts alongside the road were coping admirably, apart from one section where six temporary waterfalls had appeared in close proximity which we had to drive through!
We stopped off at two permanent falls en route, Fantail Falls were spectacular and the view of them was enhanced by the mini towers of rocks created by visiting folks in the foreground.
Thunder Creek Falls dropped from a couple of hundred feet, wow!
We stopped for a cuppa and a warmed blueberry muffin in Haast and I fell into conversation with a Canadian woman who was writing her journal at the next table. She was woofing around the countryside and described to me some of the jobs she had been doing: chicken herding; tractor driving and gardening. We discussed our enjoyment of journal writing and she said the idea for hers had come from a woman at a place where she had been woofing. The owner was a writer who encouraged her to write down her thoughts. She also told me a sweet story from her youth which she had recalled recently. A good friend of the family had described her as a 'white raspberry' which is difficult to pluck from the bush, hard to bite into, thorny and sour to taste! Meaning she was immature and not yet ready to experience the world and understand it. The Canadian woman felt that, with her recent life experiences, she was now beginning 'to blush'. We also discussed the creek names but, interestingly, she said she didn't note the names because they shouted of ownership. I explained I came at them from a different approach. They gave me a historical picture and I enjoyed their quirkiness.
More creek names were added to my list after Haast: Serpentine Creek; Gout Creek; Roaring Swine Creek; Dancing Creek; Gunboat Creek; Dizzy Creek and Glitter Burn Creek plus Snapshot Creek.
We passed lots of the 'Wicked' campervans favoured by the youngsters. I love their psychedelic livery and their hippy quotes, I should have been blipping them through our holiday.
Two more quirky names today were Roaring Billy Falls and the Windbag River.
Sadly we were not able to cycle up the track to the glacier lookout at Fox Glacier because the weather was too awful and later we heard that all the paths had been closed. We lunched in the Hobnail Cafe and continued a further half an hour to our destination here at the Rainforest Retreat Campground (we are indeed parked in our own little bit of the rainforest although I am half tempted to chop down the ferns outside the door which wet me every time I leave the van!)
After a brief trip out to the village of Franz Josef to check on the status of Tony's heli-hike tomorrow (looking unlikely) and to suss out a place to eat for my birthday meal tomorrow, we are now holed up against the weather which has worsened considerably since our arrival. We can't complain, we have been very fortunate up to now.
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