Driving the Forgotten Highway was great, lots of sheep! And vistas that fell away for miles with hills like the mountains I used to draw as a child, rounded but steep. The sheep are everywhere (this is New Zealand right?) dotted on the hillsides, packed together against fences, standing still when it is raining really hard. I find it hard to capture the grandness of it all in one photo. I take pieces of the landscape and stitch it together like a crazy quilt, a cliff face here, a river gorge, hills and valleys. At one point a couple of the campers from last night were stopped beside the road, someone had draped close to a dozen boar hides on the fence, a hoof on the fence post.
I am a sucker for waterfalls and turned down an 18 km road to visit Uruha Falls, definitely lacking in signage, I trusted my instincts to find it and did. There were a couple from LA looking for the Heritage Poles from a previous Maori settlement but they lost interest when we could not determine which track to follow. I took one that seemed likely and had a little adventure, on my return I found the actual trail which we had both walked right past.
This road has heritage all over it , almost every junction has a sign indicating something way down there if you care to go check it out. The signs though are so old they have lichen growing on them, at home it takes 10 years or so, here maybe 3, but this road has been here a long time. One could spend three months exploring this area alone, folowing the signs and tracks that seem to completely cover the place, oh in between sheep stations.
Not much roadkill today, I am keeping a bit of a tally, so far mostly possums, hedgehogs and a variety of birds, I have feathers from many of them. The goat was a surprise, it is wild to see them clustered on the hillsides with the sheep, obvious in their black and brown hides.
The library in Staford has kindly accommodated my blogging today, time to move on toward the coast and New Plymouth.