Paddling again – that was the theme of this day. Murchison
is called the white water capital and it must be true. There are a lot of rivers around and they even had a water (at least a bit). Which was awesome as a lot of rivers are low on water and it is a problem to do them.
After some fiddling around and talk in local raft company we decided to do the Matakitaki river. Just as we got there another Spaceships‘ car came with back door opened and a lot of dust inside. Charlie from US got out and when he found the back door is opened it was clear to him why they got that amount of dust inside. He did the Earthquake run several times before and was ready to go again. On the other hand we decided to have a lunch before and do a second run with him.
This run is called Earthquake because was created after a huge earthquake when some ground slip into the river and created this nice watercourse with a lot of boulders in it. So it doesn’t have anything to do with difficulty of this part. Of course it depends on the amount of water which can change the difficulty a lot, but as we had just enough water to run, it was pretty easy, even for me. It reminded me the Stvořidla part of Sázava river.
Charlie was back in a few minutes, the run is pretty short. Vlada and Tomas jumped on the water and went with him, I decided to do it in second run. And it was really nice, with some harder parts (for me), with awesome views around and we did it pretty quickly. It was a bit harder to change the boat, the sea kayak was much more stable to me. Even the paddle is hard to hold as my hands are still weak after two days paddling in Abel Tasman. We have a short bath at the end, it is awesome that the rivers here are pretty warm.
Short walk back to the car and we moved to Maruia Falls, which guys want to jump. It is really nice waterfall, but it takes time to consider all risks here and the Sun is quickly going down so we don’t have a time to do it – tomorrow. We heard about nice sleeping place almost next to the waterfall, moving there, doing dinner and killing tonnes of sand flies – they are everywhere, even Tomas is scared to sleep outside because of them.