On Friday the weather wasn’t great and with a few hard days ahead it made sense to have a rest day. We got a lot of stuff sorted. I spent a good hour on the bikes cleaning them. Then another hour fidling around and adjusting them. Rowan was sorting rocks he had found. I sent another two post bags of stuff to my dad (sorry dad, thank you). It has made our lives significantly lighter with these bikes. The gear we need to carry is much less and resupply options are more frequent. Rowan posted a box of rocks to our old neighbours as that is where all our rocks are. Thanks Liz & Rick for keeping them safe.

Here we go, let’s take on the Haast! Our plan is to stay at Pleasant flat 45km in. This will give us a fresh day to tackle the worst part of the Haast. We took off making good time. I really enjoyed this ride. It was up and down but nothing too hard. It was a rewarding ride with beautiful views. We had a quick bite at Roaring Billy before taking off again. When we arrived at Pleasant flat for the second part of lunch it was 1pm. I was getting tired but it seemed silly to stop here. We carried on and regretted it once we got to Thunder Creek.

Just past there we started pushing our bikes. The sweat and the unhappiness was pouring out of us. We nearly made it to the top when I joked that an SUV with a speedboat could have picked us up. We got up some more and we had that exact car pull in front of us. Extremely lovely couple. Pauline said, “Put your bikes in the boat, and we will take you to the top.” She told us how she felt bad for us and made John turn around to help us. We were very thankful and tired by then. At the top of the hill they dropped us off and we had a mostly downhill run from there. We got to a spot we could access the Makarora River around 4pm. We thought this is as good of a place as any.

This must have been the coldest swim we have endured so far on this trip. The snow melt made it pretty cold. I was brave, I am getting much better at these cold swims. 🥶

We made a friend with a cute puppy that came to do a little fishing. He said we could stay here, but I am not sure if we were really allowed to camp there.