Kina Beach to Picton

Sunday 22.01.2011

We didn’t do a lot of sight-seeing today, mostly due to wind and rain all afternoon and evening. We are on the ferry to the North Island tomorrow, sailing at 1pm from Picton to Wellington. It’s three hours across Cook Strait; hopefully the weather will have improved by then!

We said goodbye to the lovely little Kina Beach camp site and set off back to Nelson. We weren’t going to stop but there was a kite festival in the park, so we had a quick look, bought some (very) mini doughnuts before going back to the van for lunch.

As the weather closed in we drove over the beautiful Bryant Mountains to the Rai Valley. After Pelorus Bridge we followed the Pelorus River to Canvastown and Havelock. All along this road there is evidence of recent devastation from land-slips and flooding. The river has obviously burst its banks leaving debris, sometimes in the shape of whole trees, in the surrounding fields. This is what it looked like in December.

A couple more days like today and it'll be the same again!
At Havelock we turned off in the rain onto the Pukenu Hill road, which has a very steep climb to the Moenui Lookout.

It then becomes the Queen Charlotte Drive, and after 35kms precariously winding round various ravines, outcrops and overhangs, it finally descends from the sheer cliffs and returns to sea level at Picton, which nestles at the end of Queen Charlotte Sound. We think Queen Charlotte must have been a thrill junkie; this is the twistiest road we’ve been on since we got here; if it hadn’t been chucking it down with rain the whole time our little Toyota’s tyres would have been smokin’.

We drove straight through Picton; we’ll have a look at it tomorrow, todays mission was to find a nice camp-site with nice showers. We did that, at the Waikawa Bay Holiday Park, and we got a nice view of Picton Marina thrown in.

At the moment it’s raining so hard we can’t actually see it.