Calm after the storm

Gill's notes:

Am. sun. Area seems to have survived OK, but lots of roads closed - north into the park + south, in Greymouth area also. Go for walk. Meet weird people who live in 5th wheel van 5? large sons. After lunch - Pete swim, then drive into Abel Tasman - road in poor state, lots of storm damage - talk to person on beach. Back at camping cook in communal kitchen - French oyster man. Rain in night.

After the wild weather yesterday we expected to wake-up to devastation. Astonishingly, apart from half the beach having been dumped onto the road it all looked very normal. The local authority was out already with tractors and dumper trucks returning the sand to the beach.

 Most surprisingly of all the sea was quite calm, so much so that I decided to go for a swim.

In fact it was a rather lovely mild morning, so we decided to explore one of the marked trails on the forested cliffs to the south of the village. It is very beautiful here, presumably even more so further north; the Abel Tasman Park is are large tract of sparsely populated wilderness by the sea, one of the reasons why we came here was to explore it, how possible that would now be given the reports of landslips and fallen trees remained to be seen.

We doubled back around the saltwater lagoon that lies at the back of Kaiteriteri beach. There was no sign of any storm damage here at all. We speculated that surviving unscathed in a tropical storm may be a bit of a lottery, that the impact may vary within a very small area depending whether you are sheltered from the prevailing wind. Whereas the beach area where we were staying was utterly open to the elements, here by the lake, less than a kilometer away, lay in the lee of the wooded headland we had just walked around. There was no sign of any damage at all, not even the odd broken broken branch. Our meteorological  musings were interrupted when we were faced with the most enormous caravan we had ever seen parked near the entrance to another campsite. It was a huge American 'fifth wheeler with two slide-outs, so big it had to be pulled by a lorry - a former 4WD heavy duty fire-truck.

We attempted to take a surreptitious photo or two but drew the attention of the owners who were happy enough to tell us about their outfit which they lived-in full-time. They invited us inside  to admire how they had customised it to suit full-time use. They were very friendly and offered us a cup of tea. As in any meeting of strangers in the English speaking world the conversation began with a word about the weather. They confirmed hereabouts had not been affected much by the storm at all.

In the end we learned something of their life story, that after a number of setbacks they had ended up living in the trailer with their three sons who seemed to be in their late teens or early twenties. They were keen to press upon us how 'blessed' they had been; it soon became clear that each one of them had been 'born again', possibly more than once. We beat a retreat as quickly as politeness would allow. We discovered later what we had stumbled upon - Bethany Park Christian camp is clearly marked on Googlemaps, to alert unsuspecting atheists I presume.

The whole purpose of staying at Kaiteriteri had been to spend a day exploring the Abel Tasman National Park by taking one of the launches from the pier that ferry hikers up the coast to the starting point of one of the trails. The cyclone meant that the boats were cancelled and we had noticed on our morning walk that the road beyond Kaiteriteri had been closed. However, by early afternoon the barrier had been removed so we decided to take a trip out to see how far we could get.

The asphalt stretches beyond Kaiteriteri for another 5 miles or so to the even smaller village of Marahau. The road was flooded in parts and half closed by minor landslips, passable just. It was clear from the number of big branches littering the beach that the further north you went the greater the cyclone damage became.We met a young guy on the beach who had been staying in a cabin in Marahau, he was waiting to be evacuated as the campsite he had been on had been severely damage. He said that he had heard that someone in the village had been killed and hundreds of tourists were stranded in the National Park and further north along Golden Bay all the way to the S. Island's northern tip at Puponga. It began to dawn on us that we had been very fortunate indeed having only just avoided the worst effects of the cyclone. 

We headed back to Kaiteriteri, used the camping kitchen to cook, had an interesting chat to a young Frenchman from the Ile de Re who was working as a freelance adviser to New Zealand's burgeoning mussel farming industry. It turned out his father owned mussel beds back in France, the knowledge he had picked-up as a boy had provided him with a ticket to travel the world.

The TV evening news showed a map with scores of road blockages around Nelson and further south, exactly the direction we were heading for tomorrow. What are the chances of uf getting all the way to Greymouth, we wondered?







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