s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

So Saturday, to kill time waiting to hear about the house, Stephen and I planned to just take a drive up over the Rimutakas toward Masterton (yes, I will eventually draw a map, and label it and stuff. :^P If someone else wants to take the initiative and provide me with a sketch outline of, say, the southern third of the north island, I can tweak and label it in Photoshop. Otherwise it will probably be a while before I get to it myself, as I currently don’t have access to either my Intuous pad or my scanner). Turns out Chris and Natasha had plans to head up that way anyway (for reasons I am not at liberty to disclose). So we teamed up.

The Waiohine River, BTW, was named by a famous Maori tohunga (loosely, “wizard”) named Hua who was mourning his wife, whom he’d recently turned into a stone back on the west coast. At some point, I’ll get the whole story and know why he turned her into a stone in the first place — although I suspect it was because she ran off with some other guy. Isn’t that the way these things usually work ?

Stephen and Chris horsing around:

The Waiohine Gorge is, incidentally, the location of the infamous Swing Bridge, featured so prominently in C&N’s earlier blog posts, and in the nightmares of tourists the world over. I recall seeing photos of this bridge on their blog and thinking “Ehn, that doesn’t look so tough.” You’ll think that, too, because the photos don’t really give you the full perspective, although I’ve done my best. Suffice to say, it is a bridge to respect, and not one that Len would go over no matter how much money you hung in a bag on the other side.

While I would not describe myself as “terrified” or even really “scared”, there was some definite adrenaline action there, I felt no special desire to take my hands off the cable hand-guides (although I had to take one off to get the several pictures I took looking down past my boots), and I’m pretty well convinced that we did *not* evolve from anything that lived in trees, unless they were especially large, thick, sturdy, trees. And short.

Wow, total jungley rain-foresty goodness up there, though, with, just green everywhere. It was one of those places where the trees just become upright ground for other stuff to grown on — vines, ferns, mosses of every shape and description.

Some assorted photos of People in Green:

Hard to tell, but those are cherry blossoms Stephen is standing in in that last one, which transitions to a couple shots of the rivers — I’m guessing that the little one is the Waiohine, and the larger one is the Ruamahanga (Ruamahanga means “Two Forks”, although there is more complicated story involving the tohunga Hua again), but won’t know for sure until I get a better map.

That little spur Stephen is standing on, with the Ruamahanga behind him, is all of about 8 inches wide at the top there. The previous photo shows how the Waiohine laps up against the bottom of it, and is forced to lap around the edge of it before joining up with the Ruamahanga.

Shortly after those pics were taken, the rain started up and we called it a day.

We got the house !!!

More later.