30 Temporary; 50 Temporary

Lazy morning. After breakfast, Andy managed to upload yesterday’s post (the internet was free at the Sequoia Lodge and Backpackers and so dead slow). We only have nine days left on the bus so it was time for me to start looking at what we’re doing next and send a few emails about.

We had time to walk into Picton, or more accurately to the Picton Village Bakkerij. The place was filled with goodies. We picked a few treats to go (tough decisions had to be made, as well as our daily flat whites; these are definitely keeping us going.

We left soon after 11am. Our convenience stop was at Wairau Valley. Just outside the church, there was a little book swap library by the side of road and it was filled with many good books but mine’s in my rucksack so my book swap will have to wait.

We drive through Marlborough Country, vineyards either side of the road. We climbed a little, driving through the Six Mile Scenic Reserve and then Nelson Lakes National Park.

We stopped for lunch at Kerr Bay by Lake Rotoiti. Andy went on a small loop walk. I went for a refreshing swim.

We’re using an alternative road today. Our original itinerary was for us to spend the night in Kaikoura with some pretty amazing wildlife viewing options for tomorrow. But following the Kaikoura earthquake last November, the road is still closed and the itinerary was amended. The road we’re travelling on used to have little traffic. It had 40 trucks on it a day, it now has 400. This means that they are frantically trying to expend it, so lots of road works are going on. Endless road works. Often, our speed is regulated to 30 or 50. Where sections of the road used to be one lane, this is now extended to two lanes. They’ve got Bailey bridges from The Great War out of storage and these are working as second lanes over rivers. They reckon the route to Kaikoura will re-open by Christmas, just over a year after the earthquake. But rumours say it will take much longer.

The sky’s blue. There is not one cloud.

The landscape is rural and agricultural, against a mountainous background.

The quiet town of Murchison, where we had a convenience stop a few weeks ago, is now seeing a lot of traffic passing through. We had a twenty mins stop there today too, and we discovered Dust & Rust – full of amazing vintage and antique stuff. I was tempted by an English-Maori dictionary but the $59 NZD price tag was prohibitive. Instead, I got a lemonade ice block.

We crossed the Lewis pass and got spectacular scenery.

We arrived in Hanmer Springs around 7pm. We got our swimmies, and rushed to Hanmer Springs Thermal Pools. The complex closes at 9pm so we had 90 mins going from pool to pool – some geothermal ones, ranging from 33c to 42c; other pools had cool features like the Lazy River where the current carried us round a course, and the pool where every five mins a bucket of water would fall over.

We walked back down the main street, located our cabin and dumped our bags and returned to the main street. It was near 9:30pm by then; the first bar we went into was closing (we’d been hoping to try local wines there). We ended up in Fire and Ice – a much larger bar attached to the Mac’s Brewery – where we had a couple of beers.