24/25th June Whanganui River Road to Whanganui The Whanganui river is one of the nine great journeys of NZ! Typically started off the forgotten world highway and travelled via canoe, the bottom 64km can also be done as a road trip if you like narrow roads and tight bends (but it is a sealed road!). I figured it would be more exciting than the highway, and it certainly proved me right. A beautiful winding drive along the wall of a gorge stretching the length of the river. A mix of native bush and pine trees, very little cleared areas and farmland (although a lot of farms, not sure what they're doing with them!). It's largely a DOC national park, but also ancestral land for the local Maori tribes so again there's a number of maraes on the route. The first adventure came only a few km onto the road where there was a big mud slips. Slips are a pretty common fact of life driving in NZ, particularly with the weather being on and off so much lately. I've been stuck at stop signs waiting for diggers to clear them, more often forced into single lane passages to get around them. This is the first time I've had to help clear one! Luckily my timing was pretty good, I arrived after most of the heavy digging had been done and there was a track through. Unluckily the campervan right in front of me veered a little too far to the side and got stuck. With one local, one camper and two other tourists going the opposite way, we had a bit of a mission to get it out. I had a nice conversation with the van driver, who is from Wanaka in the South Island and came up here for the kiwi picking season, while we waited for the local man to drive home and pick up tow ropes, and then as soon as he'd come back and got everything tied up to his (small, old, not-4x4) car, a massive ute came barreling down from the other side, barely even pausing before the owner jumped out and grabbed his own tow cable. This must be a fairly common occurrence, I saw plenty of other cleared slips on the drive around. I decided not to chance my driving to get Piri through the mud, but the local guy had her through no hesitation. At least it was a beautiful spot to be stuck for an hour! Highlights of the drive were an old flour mill, all still left standing as it was and free to access, and the marae at Koriniti which has two meeting houses, both elaborately carved. There's a sign up the top of the road saying visitors are welcome to enter (this is rare for maraes, generally you have to be invited and go through a ceremony) but since it was late and winter there was no one around to let me in! :) it was nice to look at anyway! Further on, I did half of a walk up to a viewpoint before being stopped by the mud and then finding a perfectly good viewpoint on the road :) Back on the highway, I headed directly for Whanganui which appears to be NZ's big art-focused town, lots of galleries and public sculptures. Although it was Sunday so not everything was open, I explored a few galleries and watched a man working in a glass blowing workshop with lots of heating and rolling and stretching of coloured glass.















