A day of many stops

Our plan for today was to drive the road to the West Coast and using our Campermate app see what stops there are along the way we'd want to visit. This app has proved to be so valuable because it works offline so you can easily look up anything from things to do, campsites, dump stations and even cashpoints. With your location on your phone on as well it's easy to follow the route and where to stop for these things. Our first stops were at a couple of viewpoints for Lake Hawea because the highway basically runs along side it. It's turned out to be another nice day so the water was a beautiful blue colour in the morning sun. If it wasn't so cold you really felt as if you could go for a swim. We stopped at a town that pretty much only had a cafe for a toilet break and some morning treats to break up the journey. With a few DOC campsites on our route we decided to drive until we felt we needed to stop and spend the night at the nearest site. When we left the cafe after warming up by the open fire we headed back onto the highway only to be met by about a hundred cows walking towards us. I love how so many herd moves seem to happen on major highways. The cows were a little more daunting than sheep with some walking head on towards you and only moving at the last second. Once we'd made it through the cows our next stop was Fantail Falls, a two minute walk from the carpark to a waterfall. It's a shame it wasn't more of a walk because the area was lovely and you could walk right out onto the riverbed and get quite close opposite the falls which fanned out much like the fantails tail. We stopped at Thunder falls which was completely different in style with a single powerful jet of water literally thundering down. The sound of the water was quite incredible and really gave you a sense of how powerful it is. Our last stop of the day was to Ship Creek on the coast which has a board walk through the sand dunes and onto the beach. It wasn't nearly as good as we had hoped but we did enjoy strolling back along the beach looking at the vast variety of rocks and stones. I did however get bitten on the neck by a sandfly and it instantly came out in a nasty reaction so I now feel like I have a vampire bite on my neck! After we made it back to the van and rubbed cream on and took an anti histamine, we headed to our campsite for the night which was at Lake Paringa. The setting was stunning and fortunately we saw a guy setting himself up to photograph the lake. We soon realised he was waiting for the water to still so the lake reflects perfectly the mountain scape behind it. Because he was there to alert me to this scenery I managed to go out a couple of times and get some great photos of the lake as evening set in. We had a fantail show so much interest in our van as soon as we arrived. He kept flying up to the windows and into the sides. Initially we thought he was being aggressive but we soon realised he was eating sandflies off the camper. It was quite a shock every time he suddenly was at the window you were sitting by but we were happy our van helped him bring the sandfly numbers down. We opened the door for a moments ventilation and have spent about 2 hours killing around 20 sandflies! This definitely is the main draw back to NZ especially when I react so badly to their bites. Hopefully we got them all and I can sleep easy tonight.Read more