Welcome back! Hopefully yesterday's post wasn't too bad, I promise things get more exciting. Day 2 - Enjoy
Imagine waking up and not really knowing where you are or if what you did the night before was really a dream or not. Yes, I suppose I did just describe the Saturday morning of about 85% of college students so let me rephrase this. Imagine you wake up in a tent, dim light filtering through the fabric above you, bugs bouncing in between the layers of the tent in a frenzy to get at you. The tac tac tac of rain as it claps the outer shell of the rain fly. You haven’t got the slightest clue what is outside of your tent because you arrived in the middle of the night last night, all you know is there is a boat launch nearby and some body of water. This is how I started Day 2 of my spring break.
After waiting and listening for the rain to ease up I wriggled myself out of the warmth of my sleeping bag cocoon and headed for the screen door of my tent. After unzipping the first layer I paused for a moment and braced myself for the first glimpse of whatever it was I was about to see. As I pulled up on the rain fly, light spilled into the tent and inch by inch I was met with a view that would have made the Lord Of The Rings characters jealous. A big lake shouldered on both sides by a mountain range that horseshoed around behind me and flared out again in front. Along the far side of the lake, another set of mountains, nestled in clouds suspended like a belt across the waist of the mountain range. A small island lay just a hundred feet or so from shore, home to neglected rocks and the grassy weeds that keep them company.
My jaw was on the ground and I was starting to collect rain water in my mouth. Never before have I awoken to be met with a surprise of such great expanse. Wasting no time at all I had one idea immediately upon seeing this and that was to swim out to the island. Despite barely being able to open my eyes at this point in the morning, I threw on my swim trunks, or ‘togs’ as they are known here and headed for the water. It had a chilling bite but not nearly as bad as the Pacific did yesterday. The further I got away from shore the muddier the bottom got until finally I had to doggy paddle my way across the rest of the gap until I reached the island. There I stood at the centre of the island, the focal point in an amphitheatre of nature, raw and pure. It wasn’t long after this that I was joined by a few friends that braved the chilly swim over and we all shivered together on the little island. We then realized there was no sense in getting sick after the first morning of camping and returned to the campsite.
After packing up the tent and having some trail mix for breakfast I figured that perhaps it would be worth it to go to the waterfall from the night before and take some pictures in the daylight. The hike there took only a fraction of the time it did in the night but it was impressive nonetheless. Like a Jacuzzi jet coming out of the bushes the waterfall had no grandeur but was rather deceiving because it seemed to come out of nowhere with so much power. After taking photos with each person’s camera… we headed back to the campsite.
It was really quite funny because where we had parked and set up our tents was nowhere near the actual tent sites. We were right next to the boat lunch, and the washrooms along with tent sites and ‘rubbish bins’ were all about 200 meters away in either direction. For the ride up to the visitors centre of the park I hopped in a different vehicle with my friend Bene from Germany. This van was a beast with a king size bed built in the back, such a cool car! The drive to the visitors centre was breathtaking not only because of the views, but because we were backtracking from last night and it had been too dark to see what we were missing out on.
Monstah, Helga and Jackie Chan
After consulting the people at the visitor center we decided to do some hiking in the national park. Our first hike took us through a rainforest type atmosphere with bits of snow lying next to the trail up to a lake at the top. It is soo strange to be walking through different climates over the course of an hour or so. When we got back down we took a different trail to some really impressive waterfalls. The first one I had to get in and try and swim towards, it was enormous! As I swam closer to the falling water I could feel the temperature drop as the depth of the pool below increased. I swam as hard as I could for a minute or so but it was like a treadmill, I could not get any closer to the wall, the water was too fast. I retreated back to land and just admired the authority of it all.
Following the waterfall hike we drove a short while down the road in search of some caves but they turned out to be very small and unimpressive. The views over the lake certainly made up for them though. Standing at the edge of bushy cliffs, clouds bruised the sky above me out over the lake. A mountain jutting up from its center covered in a sheet of shade, sunlight beamed down, reaching for the shore. I felt like I was suspended in a photograph; the size and lucidness of everything was magnified and I stood there with nothing but wide eyes and a skipped beat.
Sadly it was time for us to leave the park and move on to our next campsite. The drive out of the park took a little over two hours of winding, single lane gravel roads along steep drops into rainforest covered valleys below. Slaloming through peaks, cows grazed on and along the road like massive traffic cones, keeping Graeme and I nervous at every bend. Pavement never seemed so luxurious, although it only came for half a kilometer or so at a time for bridges, a tease. However, once we did leave the park we longed for the bumpiness of it of the gravel, the backcountry feel, away from the other cars, constantly winding back and forth keeping you alert and alive. The concrete was so dull with no promise of leading to anywhere but some building, if we were lucky maybe another gravel road. It rained hard for a short while as the light dimmed and so I turned on No Rain by Blind Melon, stopped it. Oh the power of the van DJ!
After being run around a bit by the GPS we finally arrived at our next campsite just outside of Rotorua, in the dark yet again. It was flooded by the high waters of a lake but there were still some dry spots where tents could be pitched. The drinking water was out of the question as it was orange… if it had tasted like juice I probably would have allowed it but I felt like I was gulping down blood with shards of sandy metal in it; not even boiling this shit would have helped. As we finished dinner it started to rain again and we all scurried like bugs back to our shelters, afraid of being washed away, what intrepid campers we were.
As I lay in my tent looking up at the shallow ceiling, the sound of the rain drops on the fly consumed me. I started to drift off to sleep, wondering what I would see outside that door tomorrow, hoping I wouldn’t be floating on the edge of the lake.
Please come back tomorrow for Day 3!
Cheers,
Brayden
This video shows the view from our campsite where we stayed for night one, once the shots of the lake are done (45 second mark) you are getting into areas that I will talk about in later posts.
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