Checking out Opunake

For the third day in Opunake, we took a bit of tour of the town. Early in the morning, I headed down to the beach again to soak my feet. I have been rather clumsy of late with my feet. I keep banging into things and scraping them. Then in Fiji I did the snorkelling with the fins, but no booties, and I rubbed my toes raw. Coupled with breaking my shoe the a couple of days later and wandering around in the mud, I had developed a bit of infection in a couple of my toes. So I was soaking them for a few minutes a couple of times a day at the beach in Opunake in order to try and clear the infection. It was also just nice to spend a few minutes in the surf on the beach each day.

After breakfast, we headed out to the point what felt like northwest-ish of town. The view along the shore and cliffs was amazing.

Also visible from that point was one of the off-shore drilling rigs for a local oil company. It was either 14 or 40 kilometers off the coast, depending on who is telling you. I am voting 14, since I think 40 puts it beyond the curve of the earth, but I don't remember the math. In any case, with my pretty impressive camera lens, I was able to take a photo of it.

After looking at the coastal cliffs for a while, Mat went down for a look to see if he could find some paua, or abalone. Due to attempts to help the population of abalone recover, there are restrictions of 10 per person per day for anyone catching them. Of course, that's only if you can find them, and Mat had no luck this day.

Next we headed to the cemetery, through which the Opunake portion of the New Zealand Coastal Walkway goes. We were heading out in an effort to see an old Maori fortress hill. We found this tombstone in the cemetery with an interesting name.

And then it was all for naught. The trail led past a bunch of cows, a number of electrified fences (and yes, I can absolutely say for sure that they were indeed electrified, having tested the matter for myself; not a recommended course of action), down a hill to a river with an iron bridge. That was broken. And with their baby along, we just didn't feel much like fording the river and getting wet. So, I contented myself with a photo of the hill fortress from our side of the river.

Later, Mat and I took a walk around the local lake. While we were walking, we noticed a hole that someone had dug. There were sticks and stones sticking out of the hole. We found out later (the next day) that someone had dug the hole, put sharp rocks and sticks at the bottom, covered it over and left it to be found by a passerby, the hard way. And a woman in her fifties did just that, luckily only twisting her leg as she fell in the hole (luckily because with the sharp sticks, she might have been impaled and far more seriously injured). We continued on. The farmland around Opunake is very green. Then we arrived at the cliffs on the coast again. Mat took me down to the base of the cliffs which, in times past before people really thought better, were used as the dump. People would pile their garbage into trailers, take the trailers to the cliff edge, and dump the garbage over into the sea. Now, we find that horrifying, but that is how it was done before.

But now the result is that at the base of the cliffs, there are piles of old garbage. One kind of garbage in particular is masses of iron and other metal. It has been there so long that it is now just one big mass of metal, fused or melted together. It is an interesting sight.

And Mount Taranaki put in an appearance as well, poking its head through the clouds.