The Rest of Golden Bay

When I wasn't busy being highly creeped out by sheep (see below), I did have a fun-filled day of Golden Bay adventure. Well, not so much adventure as sightseeing, but I wouldn't want to make it sound boring.

I started off by going to a place called Pupu Springs, or Waikoropupu, if you want to get technical. It's the largest spring in Australasia! Enthralling, I know. But, it also has some of the clearest, cleanest water you will see in the world. According to the sign at the place, the only place with clearer water is under an ice shelf on Antarctica or something. I haven't uploaded my pictures, but here's a good idea of what it looks like:

Pretty, isn't it? Apparently people used to be able to snorkel and/or dive at the springs, but there's a really invasive algae that can be transported by not-perfectly-cleaned anything and they've banned it. You can't even put your hand in the water now.

After Pupu Springs, I just sort of drove around. I considered picking up a likely stinky, skinny hippie chick hitchhiker and her groceries, but drove right on past. Then I turned around because she was a skinny hippie chick with groceries standing on the side of a road in the middle of nowhere on a hot day. She was harmless. I took her a few miles to her bike hidden in the bushes up the road. She was, for the record, stinky.

Then I took a wrong turn trying to get to Farewell Spit and ended up near the "Historic Salisbury Swing Bridge." I thought I'd check it out. It was certainly historic. It was built during the gold rush era (1880s), fell into disrepair, fixed, fell into disrepair again, fixed, used after a flood washed out the car bridge in the 80s, fell into disrepair again and supposedly restored in 2004.

(note, not my feet, nor my pictures. Thanks, Flickr!)

Yeah, that didn't seem so "restored" to me. It seemed like two aging planks of wood on a very swingy swing bridge.

I was a bit daunted by the multiple "WARNING: 2 PERSON LOAD LIMIT" signs posted before you got onto the bridge, but I thought it couldn't be that bad. I mean, I was well under the weight limit for skydiving, so surely I wouldn't break a bridge, right? Then I stepped on to the bridge. I've been on swing bridges here in New Zealand before. They are constructed of modern materials, like metal. And they don't swing as much as slightly sway if you move around a lot. This thing started rolling and rocking like that horrible 1940s-era video of that bridge breaking apart in the wind.

I actually got scared. Like, my heart started pounding and and my adrenaline kicked in. Trying to walk over that thing (I would not be defeated by a swing bridge!) was scarier than anything else I've done in New Zealand.

When I was a kid, we used to go to J's Amusements in Guerneville, California every summer. It had a great go-kart track, sometimes had bumper cars, always had a Scrambler and a Tilt-a-Whirl. And they had a roller coaster. The Devil's Coach. The Devil's Coach was a wooden-frame roller coaster that I am almost certain was built in 1923 and left to rot on the grounds of J's Amusements. One of the problems with J's was that it frequently flooded in winter. It seems to me that wood submerged for weeks at a time under water might lose some structural integrity. Yet, every winter, the Devil's Coach sat.

Of course, the owners of J's couldn't just let a big revenue-earning coaster go quiet, so they sold tickets to unsuspecting (and suspecting) children for decades. It wasn't the Devil's Coach, it was the Defying Death Coach. Here's a picture from the top of the sub-par replacement coaster, Mad Mouse (taken years after J's had closed down), which had more or less the same layout:

Each turn at the top of the Devil's Coach shifted the entire structure. The little car felt like it was going to tip over and throw us all to our deaths. It was terrifying, yet thrilling. And dozens of times per summer, I paid $2.50 - $3 for the privilege of possibly hurtling to my death. Maybe this was a snapshot of things to come. The prices got higher and the hurtling to my death options more varied. Like, I guess, jumping out of a plane. I think I've figured out the source of my adventure seeking.

Anyway, the bridge was scary. I moved on quickly. Not so quickly as to test the limits of the rotting, aging planks of wood, but quickly enough. Seriously, though, I don't want to go to that swing bridge again. Maybe I have wood structure-related fears. I'd rather jump out of a plane at 15,000 feet.

After that I went to Wharariki Beach, which was gorgeous and windy. I'll post my own photos of that on facebook in a few days, I guess. Nothing particularly eventful happened that day until I started wandering through paddocks of creepy, terrified sheep.