Roadtripping reprised.

A while back I spoke about the joys of Road Tripping. This last weekend we went on a little adventure of the mini-roadtrip variety.

We picked a road out of Dunedin, and drove along it, our eyes peeled for interesting and unusual things. The first place we ended up was Moeraki, where there are these incredible round boulders. Honestly, they look like dinosaur eggs, and are big enough that I struggled to climb up on to one. The myth behind them is as follows: Maori legend tells of a great migration, in large sea going waka or canoes, which brought them to Aotearoa from their ancestral home of Hawaiki. That same legend tells of an ill-fated greenstone gathering trip of the waka of the Araiteuru people which was wrecked nearby.
While the remains of the vessel became a reef and kumara (sweet potato) became rocks, the round food baskets or te kahinaki were washed ashore and formed the almost perfectly spherical boulders scattered along a 50 metre stretch of the beach. Click on the link for the legend, and a more scientific explanation.

These boulders are really awesome. But what was also wonderful was that the beach was just that: a beach. No punters, or stalls. No ice-cream sellers, or arcades. Just a beach, some awesome rock formations, and sprinklings of very pretty shells (some of which, along with some pretty driftwood, are now decorating our bathroom). A truly wild place. Marvellous.

We decide to head back towards Dunedin after that, but took a roundabout route. We followed a sign that said "Trotter's Gorge" on a whim. It led us to a truly beautiful gorge - like something out of Jurassic Park. Lots of big green ferns, and little caves in the rock face. We did a small walk, roughly an hour long. It was a bit of a work out up the hills (I am *so* out of shape!), but well worth it for the quiet, and the birds, and the general beauty. We ran into a few people while on the walk, and they were all friendly and nice. It was lovely.

We got back to the car, and, after a quick snack of fruit, drove out again. We followed a roundabout route back to Dunedin, which took us a lot longer than expected, but which was really quite exquisite. Seems in winter, it snows up there, since there were signs about the roads being open. There are bits of rock which look like they are left over from ages-ago glaciers sticking up out of green grassy plains, full of sheep. Hills rolling away to the horizon in every direction, with hardly a sign of human habitation. It was spectacular. Dusty, but spectacular.

It ended up being a pretty long drive home, but we discovered some amazing natural beauty close enough to get to in a day. It made me desperately want to move out to the country. Lots of the farms we drove past had bee hives, and we fantasised about having a little piece of land with hives, and chickens, and vegetable patches. We drove through a couple of character-filled little villages, with old colonial houses and a timeless sense of stability.

It was an awesome roadtrip, full of exactly the sort of surprises that roadtrips tend to include. We shall have to go out on a different road next time.

Road Tripping

The wonderful thing about road tripping is you find things by accident. I have indulged in two major road trips in my life, and countless small ones. The big ones were in South Africa in 2005, and Europe the year after. The SA one involved riding from Grahamstown to Cape Town and then back to KZN where my folks live. I had been to a lot of places along that route in my years in SA, but there were still things we found along the way that were totally unexpected.

One of many possible examples: My dad smsing me when we were in Swellendam, and informing me that there was a fairy sanctuary there. And sure enough, when we went looking we found said sanctuary - a quite delightful little garden filled with various figures and statues ranging from the tinkerbell-esque to garden gnomes, from fragile glass bubbles that looked like they'd burst, to gigantic squatting toads beside ponds. I was delighted! The boys (my husband and his sons) rolled their eyes and indulged me.

Or accidentally taking dirt roads on our way to Cape Town, because we were off the beaten track. And eventually finding our way back to the main roads via many little farm gates. You are so not supposed to do that in SA. It's generally considered fairly dangerous, but as it turned out, we were ok.

Or driving merrily through the Klein Karoo, and accidentally coming across
Ronnie's Sex Shop, a delightfully idiosyncratic bar in the middle of nowhere, run by one of those marvellous characters you only ever meet in the middle of nowhere on road trips. One of these days Ronnie will get his whole own post, so I won't say too much now. :)

Europe resulted in these little adventures too. Taking the road less travelled meant that we drove through many a teeny tiny towns in France. In one of these little towns we ended up having lunch at a restaurant the size of a small study, with a huge number of roadworkers. We were shoved in a corner, shared our table with French people we could barely talk to, handed a carafe of wine and fed a very high-carb meal. And you know what? It was probably one of my favourite meals of the whole trip. It was so accidentally authentic. They rolled their eyes at us foreigners, stood on no ceremony whatsoever, and allowed for a fabulous people watching experience.

Short road trips can result in this sort of thing too. A and I have already stopped randomly at a restaurant in the middle of a teeny tiny peninsula village close to Dunedin. It had a lovely little courtyard, and when they said, "go on out, we'll bring the menu to you" we certainly didn't expect them to bring out the whole big whiteboard they'd written the menus on.

I am all in favour of taking the road less travelled. It's slower, but the view is always prettier than a motorway, and the food is better too.