Koom's Giant Tour of Big Things and Wide Open Spaces 10/09 (Bandwith Killer)

[Koom]

Well I’ll start by apologizing for a) rambling on and on constantly and b) destroying your internet cap haha.

click on the little photo's to get bigger ones

So anyway, it was coming up to Labour weekend and I felt the need to get out of town. Hamner was an option but seeing as the entire staff from my work were all going there along with the rest of Christchurch, I decided that I wanted to go in the opposite direction. My girlfriend said that she wanted to go to Mt Cook to see the glaciers that I had been raving about so I thought that it would be a good excuse to also go searching through one of the random valleys that’s in the back end of the Canterbury plains on the way there and see how many random Big Things and Open Spaces on Little Known Backcountry Roads we could find along the way. So that’s where my photo’s start, the first big thing of the journey (probably actually the second after the humungeous Canterbury Plains but meh, they’re boring) the Rangitata river valley looking towards my goal for the day which is the township of Mesapotamia.

After a 40 something km drive up a nice wee gravel road, we arrived at the “township” of Mesapotamia. Basically 3 or 4 houses hidden behind a couple of trees and a shed with a couple of old trucks in it. We carried on towards the mountains as my trusty AA map showed a spot of interest labeled “the Grave of Dr Sinclair”.

This is how empty the place is up in here;

Such a weird feeling standing in this huge valley, with the Southern Alps staring down at us and the sun burning away (was uncomfortably hot for this time of year as we walked around, no shelter to be seen for miles) and thinking that there was probably less than ten people within a days walking distance. I had to do a bit of a google search once we returned and found out that Dr Sinclair was an early explorer of sorts and died, near to where we parked, while he was out collecting flower samples and crossing the Rangitata River. The samples that he collected on his last day can be seen at the Christchurch Museum. The white water rafting down through the Rangitata gorge is awesome aswell! The Rangitata river was also one of the first to have a major irrigation dam/diversion scheme on it as well (or something like that, I haven’t researched that info yet).

So after wandering around in what seemed like the middle of nowhere for half and hour or so (funny story about the “township” on the opposite side of the river from here is that it is called “Erewhon” which is “Nowhere” spelled backwards with the W and the H transposed. Some author dreamt up the name while working there waaay back in the day) we headed back out towards the Canterbury plains.

Now it was on through Geraldine an off towards Fairlie. Fairlie nice town but it’s fairlie boring with not much to look at or do. So I thought I’d bypass it by heading off the beaten path again towards some lake/dam that I’d seen years ago but couldn’t remember…..

[Koom]

Well here’s the lake/dam that we found;

The outlet,

The dam,

The lake behind the dam,

So yeah, that wasn’t much so we headed off down some farmy looking gravel roads trying to cut across to the road up through Burkes Pass towards Tekapo. After getting myself a bit lost (I blame my map for being too old) and having to do a very well executed turning maneuver (i.e. gravel road was as wide as the GTB is long, did it in one movement, I’ll leave the details up to the imagination but needless to say, the girlfriend was stoked for experiencing her first turn like that) we then found Monument corner which is where they have actually just plonked a WWII monument down right in the middle of an intersection. No grass, no pretty garden, just tarseal and a monument…

From there I just followed the hills to find my way back to the main road and we found the third dodgiest bridge of the whole trip (second being the one near Mesapotamia). I really wanted to go through the ford but the co-pilot decided that it was too deep. I mean seriously, we’re in a Subaru, it’d make it…

After running round like a child taking photos and throwing rocks at the river, my Indian tracking skills said that we were close to the main road (i.e. I could hear cars driving past on the other side of the trees, co-pilot rolled her eyes). We got out onto the main drag and headed up over Burkes Pass to leave the green countryside behind and get into to the big open spaces of the Mackensie basin. There’s a story to come much later about Mr James Mackensie whom this area is named after.

Here is Mackensie’s dog, Friday, standing over lake Tekapo

Lake Tekapo,

Outflow from the dam, amazing colour to the water up in this area. I still need to google why it is so blue.

Pretty church that looks out across the lake. There’s also nearly always someone getting married here too.

And another gratuitous shot of my car with some reasonably decent background

From this point was where my random big stuff made by humans tour really got going…..

[Koom]

Canals and the private roads that follow along the top of their banks. They “suggest a speed limit along here It is a proper legit private road though…….

Here’s where it kinda looks like the world ends;

This is the end of this canal;

…..and these run down the side…..

Into this;

Once I’d gotten over playing around with HUGE pipes (You can hear ridiculous amounts of water flowing through them. Couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if one of those puppies got a hole in it!) we then made it down to the lakeside, back on the main road again, and I decided to jump into the lake with Mt Cook in the background.

I’m sure that one of the reasons that the water is soo blue is due to the temperature of it. I stood in there for about a minute and it burned for the duration…

Here’s Mt Cook without me blocking the view;

It was around about here that the batteries went flat in my camera. It was also about 7pm and I hadn’t gotten any from Tekapo and Mt Cook village (i.e. the Hermitage) would be closed by the time we got there. It was a perfect evening with barely any clouds, the air was perfectly clear and the mountains stood out like a huge row of majestic giants. I was a bit pissy about not being able to get photo’s but that passed away once we walked into the YHA hostel in Mt Cook village and I realised that I was going to have to spend the night surrounded by more foreign females………

[Koom]

So yeah, that’s the view you get when you wake up in Mt Cook village. Pretty decent. If I can think of better scenery to wake up to, I’ll write a story about that too haha.

From Mt Cook we drove around the corner (more gravel roads) and did a short hike up some rocks to get this view of the biggest glacier in NZ.

Its pretty cool to stand up on top of a pile of massive rocks that were all left there by the glacier sometime in the last ice age. Apparently at that time the glacier was 700m taller than the point we were standing on and went about 60kms further out into the valley. Basically it would have been to the end of lake Pukaki which was the one I was standing in earlier. You can see the line scored down the valley by this previous glacier in some of the photos. Also the Tasman glacier, the one here in the photo’s that’s covered in shingle and ends in the freezing brown lake with ice bergs, is about 200m tall at its terminal face. So that’s obviously a rather deep lake that we are looking down on.

So we took off out of the Mt Cook area and headed back down the side of the lake. I was on a mission to get to Kurow by 1pm as I didn’t want to be driving up some dodgy mountain pass that I’d never heard of before, too late in the day just incase I broke the GTB in there. On the way out through the MacKensie Basin, we took a minor detour in to see Lake Ohau. I’ve been through this area plenty of times before but never stopped in to see this one. Turns out there’s only about ten houses up next to it and from the main road the valley is hidden behind a bit of a ridge line. Makes for spectacular photos looking back out from Lake Ohau across the rest of the basin.

Here’s the view from the township (i.e. random bunch of houses on a hillside) looking up towards the skifield.

I’ve heard that the Lodge up on the ski field is a pretty decent place to stay over for a night or two. Might have to visit next winter.

So back on the main road after our wee detour and headed out towards the Waitaki valley area. I bypassed Omarama by going down Prohibition Rd. I’m guessing that there’s some story behind the road and was hoping to see something old that harked back to the old gold rush days………but it was a straight piece of road with a couple of sheds on it. Boring as. Anyway, to the next stop on the grand national tour of big stuff that man has made in this part of the country to mess with nature, the Benmore Dam. Yet another stunningly bright blue lake!

This dam is one big sonofabich! Looks like a big version of what I used to try to make when I was a kid to stop the local creek from flowing out into the neighboring farmland. Except this one is big enough to drive over, power a large chunk of the country and have the coolest looking waterslide in the country.

Have a look on youtube for Benmore Dam Spillway to see how big a wave this thing creates when they flush 1000 cumecs of water out through it!

Then we took of towards the metropolis of Kurow, passing lake Aviemore. Funnily enough Kurow was pumping that day! I was surprised that it was hard to find a carpark on the main street (also just about the only street).

If you go into the local tavern here, it is full of pictures of Richie McCaw and random assed stories of how great he is and how far he runs through the high country on training runs. The tavern itself also looks like a brothel from the 50’s but the local Caltex sells Racegas at the pump! I manage to stop myself putting a tank of 100 into the GTB and we head off across the mighty waitaki river towards the Hakataramea Pass.

This bridge across one of NZ’s biggest rivers wins the award of dodgiest bridge on the whole trip. It slumps about a foot in the middle, on one side, and you have this massive amount of bright blue water laughing at you as you cross it, waiting to claim victims when the bridge finally decides to give in to the river below.

[Koom]

So this is the part of the trip where I decide to completely avoid main roads, civilization, tourists etc etc and go as far off the beaten path as what I can in that area. The choices were heading around the hills and out to State Highway 1 via Waimate (its like a boring version of Gore to those who don’t know), or going back through the Mackensie Basin, or best of all, heading up through the Hakataramea Pass. This is shown as a wee white line in my map full of yellow lines so it looked dodgy as. Just my type of road!

There’s so few places up this valley that each individual farm has its own signpost…

’

This is one of those roads that is soo quiet that you start wondering if they’ve closed it off and somehow you missed the roadblock…Also the road starts off as a normal country two lane road with white markings and marker posts down each side. It then becomes a two laned road with no markings and bits of gravel on either side. Then it has cattle stops across it and it changes to a 1.5 lane gravel road.

(Where we’re going)

(and where we’ve been)

After the road passes right past the farmhouse for the giant sheep station we are now driving through, it becomes a single lane gravel road with fords and sheep. Was very well built actually and didn’t have many potholes etc, just nice smooth, easy to drive on gravel.

Damn nice piece of road!

This is the highest point on the Hakataramea Pass. As we drove up to it, I was joking about how main roads in NZ have gates on them (as the gate was closed).

But as soon as we crested the top of the brow and saw this view, we both said in unision “oh my god”.

Sounds lame but it was such a surprise after a couple of hours mucking around in a valley and not noticing how high we had climbed that there was no other way to express our feelings. I’d always though about what was on the “other” side of the Mackensie Basin as I’d driven down the side by the lakes in the past. Now I knew, its pretty empty and desolate over there but has this extreme beauty that is just amazing to look at. Everything seems soo damn big in that area too!

This is the view driving down into the basin from the Hakataramea;

We were pretty awe-struck by it all as we drove down into it and instead of driving out towards Tekapo to head out, I wanted to head back up into the mountains via the Mackensie Pass to get to Fairlie.

This is the area where the man who this whole area is named after was captured after years of sheep rustling. “Freebooting” they called it in those days. He was a Scotsman who would steal up to 1000 sheep from the lower Canterbury plains with just his faithful dog “Friday” (so the legend goes) and then he would take them out through this pass into what is now know as the Mackensie Basin. From there he would take them down to Dunedin where he would sell them without anyone knowing that they were all stolen. He was apparently the only person who knew that the massive plains existed up in the mountains at that time. Once he stole 1000 sheep from “the Levels” near Timaru and he was tracked up into the MacKensie Pass, where he was apprehended and had his boots taken from him while they camped for the night in this very spot.

He escaped that night and his captures didn’t want to leave their sheep so he got away. He turned up in Lyttleton, where he had walked to, ten days later and he was taken into custody.

Back to the journey, we drove up the hill from the spot where he was captured and it was strange how one side of the mountains could be really brown and dusty, the other side was quite green and lush.

We then headed out towards Burkes Pass through some nice green farmland;

From there it was down the main road into Fairlie. Again we had the choice of main road back to Geraldine, or random country roads in behind Pleasant Point (don’t let the name fool you, its not that Pleasant there, just boring as hell). I’d been to quite a few rallysprints in this area of the country so it was interesting driving through and taking some time to stop and get some photos.

My girlfriend decided that it looked a lot like her homeland of Ireland. Such a major contrast of the countryside that we’d passed through in the previous 900kms…

And the last interesting big thing that we saw on the journey. Limestone formations are everywhere around this part of the country (in behind Geraldine)

It was then on across the plains and back to Christchurch. I can’t explain how incredibly boringly mindnumbingly dull the plains are after the stuff I’d just driven through. Also its no wonder people fall asleep and crash along the plains, 100kph feels like its slow enough to get out and walk…..

But all up, spectacular journey. Thanks for reading this far. We covered nearly bang on 1000kms in two days and made my wagon dusty as a cowboys trousers but it was all fully worth it. Now planning my next exploratory trip down through some of the goldrush areas of central Otago. They have “4WD Only” written on the map but I figure that the GTB is 4WD enough to get me through……..

[Koom]

Map of the whole trip shown here, the directions got all mixed up cause I'm a novice at GMaps. ~1000km in two days. Awesome driving roads

(Link should work now)

[Ben]

Looked like some great fun, exploring places like that used to be my thing back in the day of owning the foz'. Can't quite do the same in a B4 you lose ya ground clearance haha. Some great tracks in Central though. A good track is the Old Dunstan Road from Clarks Junction all the way up to Alex, may be a bit too rough ???

[dimin]

Shit those are some mean pictures ! Awesome scenery down the south island by the looks, I think I might have to do a drive down there myself

[subaru-mania]

look'd like you had a ball.. and theres some cool pictures in there too.. ;D

[Guest]

Fark Koom! That's one AWESOME roadie! Mate I'm moving down south when I work out how to make money for doing nothing...

[dubbedup]

nothing quite like a weekend roady, loved the pics

[nt_a_foz]

Fark man im jealous that looks like a bit of fun ay..

Bet Sheena was stoked you took her for that mission ay??

[Swindog]

Mate youve done well to get through that far! Awesome stuff. Did you go feed the fish at the Tekapo canals?

Ive been up there quite a few times and my company (Arrow) built the Hermitage and the Ed Hillary out door centre thats just been completed there.

Amazing to come round the corner and see this village sitting there ah!

I HOPE you did the movies at the hermitage. The 3d galaxy one and the history one of the mountain are so impressive

[sirwrx]

Awesome Road trip there Koom.

Alot of the area near Fairlie use to be my old stomping ground quite a few years ago.

I worked on the Dam near Fairlie before leaving the region.

The third dogiest bridge that you crossed was beside the farm that I worked on when I was at school.

Was a smart call not trying to drive through the river there as the bottom of that crossing was always very soft even for 4wd.

[Guest itsgotgo]

Awesome pics koom

Always wanted to have a good look down south...now i have no need too 8) ;D

[Guest]

Wicked Koom

South Canterbury areas are my old stomping ground lived around there for probably the best 9 years of my life

suprised you didn't attack the danseys pass lol

Cheers

T1M0

[Volcanix]

 Koom said:

Map of the whole trip shown here, the directions got all mixed up cause I'm a novice at GMaps. ~1000km in two days. Awesome driving roads

(Dunno if this link has worked. Stupid GMaps...)

linked to gmaps but not the trip, im dead keen to do your travels lol

[Koom]

 Volcanix']

Map of the whole trip shown here, the directions got all mixed up cause I'm a novice at GMaps. ~1000km in two days. Awesome driving roads

(Dunno if this link has worked. Stupid GMaps...)

linked to gmaps but not the trip, im dead keen to do your travels lol

I'll see if I can fix it up tommorrow. Might resort to Wises instead.

suprised you didn't attack the danseys pass lol

Thats the plan for Big Things etc etc version 2. Up over there, down to Alexandra then up over whatever mountain range it is where you go past Lake Onslow with random stop offs at as many of the gold rush stuff that I can find.

Awesome pics koom

Always wanted to have a good look down south...now i have no need too 8) ;D

I can assure you that it looks 1000 times more impressive when you're actually there. I reckon I need an 18MP camera with at least a 180 degree lense to even get close to capturing the extent of the scenery down there. Everything is just soo damn huge!

The third dogiest bridge that you crossed was beside the farm that I worked on when I was at school.

Was a smart call not trying to drive through the river there as the bottom of that crossing was always very soft even for 4wd.

haha yeah I wasn't keen to be digging the poor thing out of one of the first rivers I had to cross aswell. I reckon the GTB would have probably gotten bellied just getting through the rocks before even touching the water.

Mate youve done well to get through that far! Awesome stuff. Did you go feed the fish at the Tekapo canals?

Ive been up there quite a few times and my company (Arrow) built the Hermitage and the Ed Hillary out door centre thats just been completed there.

Amazing to come round the corner and see this village sitting there ah!

I HOPE you did the movies at the hermitage. The 3d galaxy one and the history one of the mountain are so impressive

It always makes me laugh as you approach Mt Cook village as it seems like they push it back further into that little corner each time I go back. Its definately well snuggled up in there. Didn't see the movies at the Hermitage, didn't know they were there? We basically arrived at 8pm and left by 8am anyway but we're planning on going back sometime and doing the tramp up to Hooker Lake so will try to check it out then.

Fark man im jealous that looks like a bit of fun ay..

Bet Sheena was stoked you took her for that mission ay??

Yeah definately. She especially liked the fact that alot of the trip was down very little known areas that 99.9% of tourists would never get to see.

[quote name='Ben said:

Looked like some great fun, exploring places like that used to be my thing back in the day of owning the foz'. Can't quite do the same in a B4 you lose ya ground clearance haha. Some great tracks in Central though. A good track is the Old Dunstan Road from Clarks Junction all the way up to Alex, may be a bit too rough ???

I'm going to have to look that one up. Planning on taking a bunch of spares on the next trip and just going for it. Might put a skid pan off one of the rally cars on the GTB first and see how far we can go.

[Guest]

wow man those are some stunning pics.

like volcanix said, im keen for some of those road too.

it would be a life changer seeing all those sights and whatnot

[kamineko]

tl;dr

you have a gf? pics or it didn't happen

haha.. ill read later when less drunk

[DRFVDR]

And an answer as to the colour of the water

It is Glacial run of and the colour is due to all the ground up rock suspended in it

Sweet sweet cruise and awesome pics

it has been wwwaaayyyy to long since i was in the south island,and as it happens I am planning a wee trip once the brumby is up and running,with 14" mudgrips and a winch i think it will tackle most places

[Koom]

 kamineko said:

tl;dr

you have a gf? pics or it didn't happen

haha.. ill read later when less drunk

a) there is pics in there

b) you've met her and been to her house

[Koom]

 DRFVDR said:

And an answer as to the colour of the water

It is Glacial run of and the colour is due to all the ground up rock suspended in it

Sweet sweet cruise and awesome pics

it has been wwwaaayyyy to long since i was in the south island,and as it happens I am planning a wee trip once the brumby is up and running,with 14" mudgrips and a winch i think it will tackle most places

Thought it was something to do with the rocky nature of the land through there. They are trying to get the same colour in the lake at Pegasus township (new one, just north of ChCh) but they are apparently struggling to stop it going dark green cause of all the plant life and vegetation in the area.

[NotAWhiteGTB]

 Koom']

[quote name='kamineko said:

tl;dr

you have a gf? pics or it didn't happen

haha.. ill read later when less drunk

/quote]

a) there is pics in there

b) you've met her and been to her house

I wasnt in that pic, and Nic hasnt been to my house. What are you talking about?

That looks pretty cool big guy I wish i was there

[Koom]

 NotAWhiteGTB']

[quote name='kamineko said:

tl;dr

you have a gf? pics or it didn't happen

haha.. ill read later when less drunk

/quote]

a) there is pics in there

b) you've met her and been to her house

I wasnt in that pic, and Nic hasnt been to my house. What are you talking about?

That looks pretty cool big guy I wish i was there

haha nice.

Was a pretty mint trip aye. Possibly more epic than our previous effort down the west coast. I was thinking of doing a similar photo story for that one too so you'll get to star in that story instead