NZ Day 4 - Old Ghost Road

Heading to the west coast we retraced our route from a few days earlier - it was even nicer the second time around - after winding through the fruitgrowing areas we headed then along flat river plains, then next to the Bulla Gorge for a while with mountain ranges looming all around us. We stopped at a lookout early on..

Jon and I thought the best part of the day was getting a chance to go for a run on the Old Ghost Road - an old mining trail I hadn’t heard of at all until recently but is apparently a popular multi-day mountain bike (and hiking) route. We parked for lunch at the start of the track as it was just off the highway and a nice place to take a break.  After a reviving lunch we got changed into very stinky running clothes (after 3 days of running and no washing machine), and headed out on the trail.  It would be a tough first day for the hikers/cyclists as the first 18kms is steadily uphill. We managed to make it to the 4k marker in half an hour - considerably faster than some of the cyclists burdened with 3 days worth of gear no doubt! Then we had an easy cruise back down the hill.  The scenery was amazing in this section and from reading John Dawson’s blog I know that the rest of the trail is pretty awesome too - something to do another time perhaps.

Back in the van we had an hour’s drive  through the last of the mountain ranges and down into Carters Beach - where we had our first paid and powered campsite booked and waiting for us - largely so we could wash clothes and charge up laptops.   The drive was really nice and had a few surprises - like this one-way-at-a-time section..  

Luckily it was the car in front of us which had a sudden encounter with a log truck coming the other way - luckily both were going slowly so all was fine.  Yesterday we had our own scrape with a log truck as we crossed a long and narrow but two way bridge.  The log truck slowed to a stop to let us by, but we still had to scrape the side of the bridge with our side to make it. Luckily it's in a section of the van that has clearly been scraped before.

With our washing done I'm writing this from Carter's Beach. I can hear the rain squalls passing by but we are cosy inside the van with all our charged devices. It looks like we've got another day of variable weather then some mostly sunny days ahead.