Day4: Methven

When you decide to blog about your trip with mates you really have to pick your friends carefully. I didn’t. Actually in general one should pick friends carefully and to be honest I was a bit casual with this bunch. Anyway, we set off in surprisingly cold conditions because metservice lied. It was however a stunning morning although pretty cold. The rainbow road is a lovely route from St Arnaud to Hanmer Springs. Over 100km you get to start off in beech forest with a few creek crossings for interest. It then changes to river flats in a wide valley and as you follow the Wairou River east it narrows into a gorge named hells gate. It’s very beautiful so you have to assume the person who named it was a miserable git but maybe doing it 100 years ago on a mule was a different experience. From the gorge you climb up to a saddle at roughly 1200m before descending into the Molesworth station and joining the mighty Clarence (before it is mighty) as it flows past Hanmer. The country changes into wide high country pasture bounded by mountains to the north and south. Our trip today was made more interesting by meeting a large convoy of vintage cars full of impressively cheerful people who did not realise they had just emasculated the Ford Ranger crowd. The temperature had started cold and got even colder so that we eventually had to stop and put on whatever cold weather gear we could muster. With some stamping of feet we headed off, snot streaming into a fine drizzle but no dust at least. Down Jolly’s pass into Hanmer where we enjoyed a warming second breakfast and obviously a coffee. 

Well I had put up with a bit of muttering about the blog from my friends, as if thier shortcomings are my fault. Dave Lear is quite affronted and appears to be convinced that my reporting of the facts is not true. Fuck him. Bernie isn’t much good. He quietly gets on with things, eats his vegetables and is generally polite. Not much to talk about. He does have some failings which include cheerfully greeting and talking to all sorts of people as if it’s normal 

Anyway, thank god we have Dave Mac who provides a veritable smorgasbord of blog fodder on a daily basis and the only challenge is to select which of his misdemeanours to include. 

As an example, if you hypothetically were enjoying breakfast in a public restaurant and you saw a scrunched up soggy tissue on a table would you a: gag and walk away, b: delicately smother it in another tissue and dispose of it or c: use it to clean the visor of your helmet?

Obviously DM picked c. Please see earlier paragraph on cold, snot. Join dots. 

I could go on but in the interests of global peace I won’t. 

Tomorrow we are heading up the Rakaia Gorge into some spectacular scenery. If Google wasn’t run by a bunch of complete pricks I could even show you some photos.