Napier – We have found ourselves in a bizarre town (to be fair, on a Sunday afternoon) which seems to shut down completely a couple of hours before sunset. Napier is all decorated in an Art Deco style which only amplifies the 28 Days Later vibe of wandering around the downtown core as the sun went down. On a bit of bad advice from our hostel manager we ended up taking a long walk around the mountain to the other side of the bay, in search of food; by the time we got there, the sun had gone down and all vestigial signs of life in the community had drained away like so much blood. The only person we saw – and at a distance, mind you – was a woman in a hoodie and (potentially) no pants, who walked into the black tide water and pulled a rubber tire out of the depths. There was also the small matter of a ballistic missile, spotted lying unattended in the shipping docks, pointed at a railway crossing where several alarming signs promised doom to any cyclist who attempted to cross.
There was nothing for us to do but turn around and hike over the mountain, through a graveyard of sleeping houses (this was at 7:30), none of which had lights on, which provided a rather exceptional view of the stars above, but did make it feel like we were under constant threat of alien attack. Napier slept, and we wandered among its ruins.
We befriended a father and his impossibly skinny daughter at the hotel in Lake Ferry over breakfast before we left yesterday morning, who told us that the principal draw of that tiny little spot on the map was the fishing – but given that neither we, nor they, were there for the fishing, we couldn’t verify this. From Lake Ferry we set out to a glow worm cave, which I expected to be a relatively small affair (it was on a farmer’s property, who charged ten bucks for a gander), and turned out to be an extraordinary underground tunnel where the glow worms themselves were far and away the least interesting element. I doffed my boots and crept through the river-carved passage barefoot, Gollum-style, into total blackness before emerging, maybe a half hour later, in a deep chasm in a silent forest, surrounded by greenery (and flies). Flies were everywhere upon our entry too – and cows – and the pervasive sense that (at ten bucks a gander, in the back of a farmer’s property) we were in prime Deliverance territory, or at least, under threat of encountering a pig-fucker hoedown. Instead, an endlessly fun, endlessly weird experience delving under the ground in search of forgotten gold. Demetre brought a head lamp – he is, it turns out, a caver – whereas I entered the underground completely unprepared and wearing no shoes. But, I’d argue, gripping those slippery rocks with my toes brought me into the place much more than my hikers would have anyway. I did a number on the soles of my feet – the innumerable barefoot kiwis we run across suggest that toughened foot-pads are inculcated into their people from childhood – but it was worth every bruise.
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