Lake Waikareiti

On April 25, we skyped our daughter Anneke and son-in-law Steve in order to join in with the singing of “Happy Birthday” to their one year old daughter, our granddaughter, Mary Lou Stasson. It was a Saturday afternoon party of friends and family in Boston when we skyped on Sunday morning at 7 AM. Good friend Charlotte Wang was the token “Spee” at the party and gave us blow by blow descriptions on the phone of what was happening. A year old--amazing! What a blessing!

After breakfast, we packed up some food and overnight things and drove just over an hour westwards towards the Te Urewera National Park, NZ’s third largest park. The big draw is Lake Waikaremoana, the site of one of NZ’s Great Walks (31 miles around 2/3 of the lake). It is the same forest where we took a guided two day walk and spent a night in a bush camp some 5-6 weeks ago. However, this time we approached from the east instead of the west.

We drove to the DOC's Aniwaniwa Visitor Center. Our plan was to hike an hour to a smaller lake, Lake Waikareiti, and take a rowboat across to the little island of Rahui in order to see “an unusual lake-on-a-island-in-a-lake.” We rented the rowboat and received in return a key chained on an old plastic bottle plus two mandatory lifejackets with which we hiked the hour up to the lake. There we found a row of seven rowboats chained to posts well up on the beach next to a wooden track for dragging the boats down to the water. There was another couple returning their rowboat so we helped them heft theirs back in place and they helped us launch ours plus gave us their four oars. They warned that the wind was coming up and that rowing was difficult.

At this point we encountered a new marital challenge--how to row a ten foot heavy rowboat in a breeze with four oars. To begin with we kept crashing our oars into each other’s and were zigzagging our way across the lake. After some “discussion” and various attempts, we discovered that the best way to progress was for one person to row while the other used an oar as a rudder.

After nearly an hour of rowing, we pulled up at a metal ladder almost hidden in the brush on Rahui Island, the only island out of six little islands on the lake that you are allowed to land on. The protected islands are possum free and full of rare red and yellow flowered mistletoe which possums love to eat. The mistletoe were not in bloom this late in the season, of course. We climbed the ladder and proceeded a few feet to a little viewing deck overlooking Tamaiti, the little lake. We explored briefly and then sat in the sunny boat to eat lunch.

Lake Tamaiti

The wind continued to increase and the clouds were blowing in so we thought it best to get back to shore. We managed to row back in about 45 minutes which we attributed to our well thought out, innovative rowing technique! However this time, there was no one to help us heft the boat back in place. With repeated one-two-three-PUSHes, we finally managed to get the boat back in its place, flipped over, and relocked. After returning the oars to the locked shed, we had only to hike an hour back to the visitor center to return the key and lifejackets. Phew!

Sufficiently tired, we drove a few minutes down the lakeshore to our night’s lodging at the Waikaremoana Motor Camp, stopping for pictures of Lake Waikaremoana and the Panekiri Bluffs.

We had reserved the most expensive option--the $78 per night chalet--which was basic but most adequate. We relaxed on our little landing overlooking the lake as dusk set in, ate our pea soup dinner we had brought with us, and spent the evening reading.