We got up early, probably one of the first. Next step is to get to petrol station (which we did) and fill up – we took more than anytime before and it should be interesting to know, what is the size of the tank. Now we are calm and ready to go to the end – Farewell Spit
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This place should be World heritage soon and it is sand spit extending about 25km into the ocean and it is wide between 5 and 8km depending on tides and contains about 2,2million cubic meters of sand (estimated in 1995). There are just two companies allowed to take you there (and you cannot get there on your own) and we chose Farewell Spit Nature Experience with Chris as our guide. He is a bit hidden in Pakawau at Old school café (which is really good and with perfect staff). And you can also find him at information centre on Farewell Spit which was built by his grandfather.
Chris is perfect guide – funny from beginning till end and full of information. At the beginning I was scared that we’ll be the whole time on the bus as we went even into small cave in it, but that wasn’t that case, we had several stops on the spit. It was just a bit hard to follow his English, which was pretty fast and he used a lot of words I don’t know (because I never needed them) as well as a lot of Maories words which are hard to pronounce and listen as well.
The emergence of the spit is pretty interesting as it is because of some tectonical plates movement which lift up the mountains here as well as some kind of shelf which catched all the sand going around in ocean currents. You can seen as well the whole geological history, different rocks and stones some with fossils in them.
A lot of birds are living here and it is interesting to get some information about them. At the end of Farewell Spit is an old lighthouse, where we had a coffee and got another tonnes of information including interesting stuff about local birds and whales. They even have here a bird, which is recordman in flying as it was able to do around 11 000km in one piece. And the bird is pretty small.
On our way back we crawl on the highest dune on this spit and as the wind is pretty strong we have sand everywhere. Vlada wanted to try if gravitation could work in this wind as well and quickly found that it could. Hopefully we would find a river to have a wash.
Wanted to see Whanganui beach but gave up because of the weather, which started to spoil a bit. Hit the road sounds like a better alternative and we tried to get as close as possible to Murchison, where should be some good rivers to do.