Day 47 - Tuesday 20 February 2024

It's now a month since I arrived in New Zealand, and a month until I depart New Zealand; I know that February is a short month, even in this leap year, but I'll count this as the half way point of the New Zealand adventure. It's all passing far too rapidly for my liking!

Today I didn't have a lot planned, so I decided to backtrack a little, and head an hour back up the road to one of the places I'd have liked to visit yesterday but was starting to feel a little tired. I set the Satnav to Pelorus Bridge Scenic Reserve, and took the winding road back northwards. The irony of this was that as I hit the winding uphill bit, Shery Crow turned up in my playlist singing 'every day is a winding road'. Next up on random play was Sheryl again with 'If it makes you happy it can't be that bad'. I have it on random play, so the timing could not have been better.

Pelorus Bridge Scenic Reserve is another film location; this time The Hobbit, and is the place that the barrel riding Dwarves were able to de-barrel (is that the term? Well, get out of the barrels) after escaping the Orcs and meet Bard to negotiate access to Laketown. I don't know whether I found the actual spot this happened, but it did look right. 

I took a path above the river signposted to a suspension bridge which I crossed; I timed it right so that I was the only one there, and the bridge definitely moved as I went over.

Then across the one lane bridge (there was a pedestrian bridge attached) and down onto the rocks that looked familiar. Again, I don't know whether this was the spot, but it was where several fans of the films were headed.

Back to the car, and I decided to have a look a Cable Beach which is suggested to have some good views. Back towards Nelson and a turn off to about 12km of roads (again with some sections under repair from landslips) bought me to the beach where the first telegraph cable came ashore in New Zealand. There was a very informative board at the top of a path that explained how the cable was laid from Sydney to here in just 11 days by a couple of ships, and how this meant people could communicate with family in the UK in just 4 days rather than waiting for 6 months by letter.

Next I'd noted that in Nelson there is a monument marking the centre of New Zealand, so I thought that was worth going to have a look at. I pulled up into the car park, then discovered that it's at the top of a hill. As I'm trying to nurse my calf at the moment, I thought that this wouldn't be the wisest course to take, so I returned to my accommodation and decided to look at Nelson town centre on foot; it was a flat 15 minute walk away, so I took my time and had a bit of an explore before returning to the Harbourside Lodge at around 15:00 to plan what I'll be doing tomorrow.

That's about all for today really; a quieter day with an early blog update. The local bar has happy hour at 17:00, so I suspect I'll be over there for that and dinner, but nothing further planned for today.