Day 55: Koriniti to Hipanga Park
Distance Covered: 33 km
The Flying Fox was top notch. Quiet, relaxing, wonderful hosts. They even sold food that adventurers want to buy, like juice and chocolate. (So many “campsites” sell junk like canned beans and pasta sauce in a glass jar.) It turns out the husband was a river guide for 16 years. Aha! It showed in all of the little touches.
The river, as expected, slowed way down. Also, the wind that was a tailwind yesterday became a headwind today. If we didn’t paddle then we were easily blown upstream. Even still, it kind of evened out into a general feeling of paddling around a lake… you paddle you go forward. If you don’t, you drift around.
The biggest change, though, was the weather. We expected rain to hit around 1 PM so we took a somewhat early lunch. The rain decided to make an early entrance and did so powerfully just as we were wrapping up. Just pouring buckets. So hard that we thought it was hail, but no, just big, cold, and fast moving drops dumping out of the sky. I pulled my umbrella out and everybody suddenly wanted to be my best friend and huddle under it with me.
We piled into the canoes, my umbrella nicely held in place by my life jacket, and started down the slow river. Fortunately, the rain let up and moved into the pattern of rain for fifteen minutes, stop for 20, rain again, and so on. Very cold and windy when raining, warmish and still when not. Good thing there was so much paddling to do to keep us warm.
We still managed to make it to camp by 4 PM. This particular park is accessible only by the river and was donated by the Maori many years ago. It’s a heck of a climb from the river, but it has drop toilets and even a rain shelter, besides a large grassy field cut short for good tenting. Awesome.
We were settling in for the evening, with the cold rain now coming down steadily outside the shelter, when we saw two people approaching. Hmm… it was two hikers we knew. Good to see you we said… how many of you are there, we asked… 16 people you say? Hmm…
One person offered that it was a great group and everyone gets along great and we will hardly notice them. Five minutes later it was total chaos. Someone knocked the German’s gas stove and canister off the table and onto the cement. Then someone released a bunch of gas from a full canister so that the air was thick with it. (Good thing it was so windy.) One person started whistling loudly and one started humming loudly. One guy saw the wet, grassy field and decided he'd try to setup his tent under the shelter, while we were still in it. Total chaos as 16 wet people ran around in a small space.
The "best" part for Emily and I was that, despite the soccer sized field for people to camp on, 5 tents showed up within a few meters of ours. Emily was trying to take a nap when they showed up. One tent started loudly playing pop music and then a bunch of them started laughing and talking while standing next to our tent. We took a picture to try to show how they bunched around us. We still don’t understand.
All of the people in the large group are good people! It’s just chaos when that many people get together in a small space and cultures collide.
Oh well, we had 6 incredibly fortunate days where we snuck between groups. Kind of unbelievable how lucky we were, really. This new group almost stayed at Flying Fox (a much smaller place) but stopped just a km or so short.
Tomorrow is our last river section. It’s 20 km into the campground where we arranged to drop the canoes. We are now in the tidal zone where we need to time the high to low tide section to prevent even more work than we already have in front of us. Gotta rest the arms tonight!