After a long drive we arrived at Golden Bay, the northern end of New Zealands South Island. Especially Katinka was tired, since she was still recovering from beeing sick, so we just got a quick shower at the climbers campground called Hangdog, cooked some dinner and went straight to bed.
The next morning we glanced again at the beauty of the landscape around us and soon went into town for a quick internet session: Now our flights are changed, instead of april 6th we are departing on april 14th from Auckland to Sydney. This means we have 8 additional days in this beautiful country and we are not as much in a hurry as we had been for a couple of days now.
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| Puanaiki Pancake Rocks |
Next we walked to the rocks. Paynes Ford is an nice climbing area with many slopers and pumpy sportroutes. We both did „Send a Gorilla“, 23 (~6c+) for warming up and I managed to fell on the very top of „Papageno“, 28 (~7c+) twice. I’m not really used to climbing on a rope, so usually the routes are way to long for me and my arms stop working after more then 20 moves in a row. I gave up, because we wanted to spend the rest of the day driving to Cape Farewell the very northern tip of the Island.
As we walked out of the area, we met Torre again, the hitch-hiker climbing with us in Castle Hill for a couple of days. He was pleased to see us again as well and hitched another ride with us. After a beautiful sunset we had a nice steak for dinner and he tuned our seightseeing todo list. The next morning we went to a beautiful beach, a 20min hike from the parking and we were almost the only tourists around, which was amazing. We enjoyed a lot of sun and sand and when the low tide came, we saw some baby seals. There was a group of 10 seals in a small pool and they were not shy at all.
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| Baby Seals at Wharariki Beach |
They touched our feet and sniffed at us and went back to keep playing with the group. It was a lot of fun to watch them.
The next day we went back to the crag and I finished up my unfinished business, ticking „Papageno“, 28 in my first go. It was only a quick climbing session, since we still had to do a fun ropeswing into the river, some internet business and some coffee trinking + town shopping in the morning hours.
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| Our hitch-hiker Torre jumping down a dune |
We had booked our ferry from Picton to Wellington for the next day, but did not want to drive all 4h30m in one rush, so we did the first 2h section in the last light of the day. We found an awesome campground just next to Nelson and continued our drive in the morning.
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| The Ferry from Picton to Wellington takes 3,5 hours |
The rest of the day was easy. We sat on the deck of the ferry for 3,5 hours burning in sun, but cooled down by wind and enjoyed the landscape. Now we are staying at our friends Toby and Carina’s apartment in Haitaitai, Wellington and will get a Wellington tour by Carina tomorrow.