Thur 19th Feb: Today is one year since we left Bristol, on a freezing cold foggy day! Peter started the day losing another tooth. This is his fifth tooth, and the fourth he has swallowed. The tooth fairy is very understanding. From Murchison we drove north-east-ish through a lot of nowhere towards Motueka. This small place is known for its ludicrously long main street which is apparently long enough to land a 747 with room for error. Unfortunately our sat nav took us off on some tiny back road just before the town and so we totally missed it! The next road took us north and was ridiculously steep and windy and went on for about an hour. Little chance to overtake but there’s so little traffic I doubt there is often a problem.
At Takaka Steve announced he wanted to turn off and take a back road to a campsite at Totaranui (pronounced Toe-tra-noo-ee). A quick look at the map suggested we’d be pretty isolated so I dashed into the first (only) supermarket and grabbed more supplies. It was 33km east to Totaranui and the last 10km were on a narrow sandy lane with sheer sandy walls on one side and steep long drops on the other, with a few big landslips on the way.
Finally we reached the end, having travelled most of the day. The sandy beach is spectacular (see photos – look no-one else there again!), the sand golden and coarse like demerara sugar, but the biting sandflies are awful. Now to me slumming it means not having a dishwasher, and this was a little more basic than I wished. The good news was there were toilets and they were flushing, but there was no electricity, hot showers, kitchen, laundry, etc. There is some concern that the tooth fairy might not find us, though.
For tea we smoked the fish Steve caught last night. Once the sun had set behind the high hills immediately behind us, it was completely dark and the millions and zillions of stars started to show through.
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