We start our journey over the Lewis Pass in Reefton. What an interesting town. We treated ourselves to a roast at the Reefton Hotel – strange what you miss when you can’t have it and having a roast in the winter is one of those things! We should have had one to share – even the mini was HUGE and enough to feed two. The Broadway tearooms and Bakery are housed in a lovely old building and they make a great flat white. There is also a small gin distillery in town, Reefton Distilling Co. https://www.reeftondistillingco.com/ which we paid a visit to. Don had a tasting and made a purchase.

From here, we drove along SH7 the Lewis Pass road. Our first stop on this road is near to the Marble Hill campsite at a place called Evison’s Wall. This is a concrete wall built in 1964 by Frank Evison a geophysicist at Victoria University of Wellington. The wall was designed to measure any movement in the Australian and Pacific tectonic plate boundary. Nothing has moved, proving that plate boundaries don’t move slowly, they build up a huge amount of pressure and then just rupture. Of course, I had to walk along the wall & I mean, who couldn’t resist leaping from one tectonic plate to another! Thank goodness the plates remained calm! It may only be a small concrete wall but it is a VERY cool concrete wall.

We continued along Lewis Pass stopping for the night at Maruia Springs. As a treat to ourselves for our anniversary, we are camping overnight here and what a treat it was. Outdoor thermal pools, surrounded by snow capped mountains & a babbling river. Such a peaceful place to enjoy a soak in the thermal springs. https://www.maruiahotsprings.nz/

We stopped a little bit further along SH7 and went for a fantastic short walk at the Lewis Pass Alpine Nature and Tarn Walk. What a wonderful loop walk this is. Surrounded by strange looking, low growing plants, Sphagnum mosses and mountain beech trees. There is also, way off in the distance, a really lovely waterfall.

Not too much further along SH7, we turn off the road and take SH70 to Kaikoura passing through a small town called Waiau. It was the closest town to the 7.8 earthquake in 2016. Most of the international coverage of the earthquake centred on Kaikoura and you get the feeling that this town was left to help itself. It was devastated and the impact of this unique earthquake is still to be seen in the area. Unique because it was caused by a complex sequence of ruptures along multiple faults, triggered by the movement of the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates. Driving through land that has heaved and rolled, seeing buildings left empty brings home to you just how devastating earthquakes can be.