25 degrees, cloudy, sunny
Cloudier start to today so we drove up the coastline to see Farewell Spit at the very top of the Golden Bay. We stopped at Te Waikoropupu Springs and Patons Rock, as advised by our Kiwi guides again.
The Springs were a sacred place to the Maori who have many weird and wonderful stories for everything you can imagine, and it was forbidden to touch the water in the Springs. Another free car park and entrance to the 20 minute walk to the Springs which turned out to be a very large pond area where crystal clear water bubbles up through the ground at over ten cubic metres per second (that would fill the pool in France in about 3 seconds!) The sandy bottom of the lake apparently appears to dance due to the water coming up, but there was a little bit of rain hitting the pool so we didn’t see anything like that.
Patons Rock turned out to be a very rock-less beach! Would have been lovely in the sunshine as it was quite deserted but nothing to keep us there in the light rain so we continued on to Farewell Spit.
This is a protected area and you can only go to the end of the Spit on a guided tour which we decided not to bother with. We could walk about 4km up one side of the Spit and then cross over to the other side, which is what we did as the weather improved quite a bit. The South side was calm and was the long curving bay of the Spit but we couldn’t quite see the end as there was still quite a bit of cloud and haze around.
The North side was completely different. It was an enormous windy beach of small sand dunes, some soft, some firm, and rolling waves, a really interesting coastline, very different to 90 mile beach which was very flat once you got over the sand dunes.
