Inter-Island

We left Nelson and headed southwest to the town of Westport on the west coast. We had stopped at Murchison for lunch on our trip north to Nelson and decided to stop again on our trip south. Murchison, now primarily an agricultural town, was once a major coal producing area. Just southwest of Murchison we came to the Buller River. The highway follows this river all the way to Westport.

As we traveled down the Buller River toward Westport we came to the Buller River Swing Bridge. The bridge is a tourist attraction and for a fee you can cross it and walk a rather nice nature trail on the other side of the river. It is the longest swing bridge in New Zealand. The Maori name for the river is the Kawatriri (kah-wa-tree-ree) which means deep and swift. Very near the location of the present bridge was a major gold find resulting in a gold rush. In late 1862 a pair of Maori prospectors found gold in Lyell creek, a small tributary to the Buller a few hundred yards down stream from the bridge. It sparked off some of the richest discoveries in New Zealand mining history. Despite the steep hillside, the town of Lyell grew rapidly to meet the demands of miners and families. By 1873 there were six hotels, three general stores plus a drapery store, an ironmonger store, three butcher shops, one baker, two boot-makers, two agency offices, a blacksmith shop and a school. In 1929 this area was the site of a road-mans cottage that was for former Lyell school, which was damaged in the great Murchison Earthquake. Seventeen people died in the 7.8 quake that occurred mid-winter on June 17. The White Creek Fault that crosses the Buller River had a 4.5 meter (about 15 feet) uplift in a few seconds. During the mid-winter quake the gorge reverberated with booming sounds and people found it impossible to stand as trees and boulders crashed around them. Families had to clamber over landsides and through thick mud for days to get to Murchison, which normally took a full day to travel by horse. In 1968 there was another quake called the Inangahua (in-aon-ga-who-ah) Earthquake. It created a landslide that temporarily dammed the river creating a lake. Today the slip is covered by native forest. No one was killed in the 1968 quake. There are still micro-quakes that occur almost every day.

The Buller River rages through the narrow gorge at thesuspension bridge. By the time we got to Westport the rain was coming down in sheets. We could hardly see the road. We decided that we had had enough rain. I got a newspaper so that I could look at the weather forecast and weather maps over all of New Zealand. The forecast for the South Island was continued heavy rain for the next several days. The only sunny places in New Zealand were Christchurch and the south-eastern part of the North Island. Our choice was between going back to Christchurch and canceling our trip or going to the North Island. We decided to go to Napier in the North Island. I purchased tickets for us and the van to cross Cook Strait early the next morning. We immediately set off to the North Island by way of Blenheim and Picton. We drove all the way back across the South Island to Bleheim where we camped in a large Holiday Park for the night.

The next morning a quick drive to Picton to catch the ferry across Cook Strait to Wellington through Queen Charlotte Sound, one of the Malborough Sounds. We and the camper van were on the Lynx. All the previous voyages I took across the strait was on the slower TranIslander. The Lynx is a much faster crossing across Cook Strait, however it is required to travel at the same speed as the TransIslander in the sounds because the wash created by the wake causes significant erosion on the banks. The trip takes about two and a half hours on the Lynx which is about an hours less than on the TransIslander.

North Revisited