Day 37

Haast township to Makarora 86 km

A truely amazing day today.
First off the weather called for rain making its way up the entire south island today. It did not rain on me. The sandfiles however were absolutely atrocious this morning. The worst since Mariua Springs. I was really wondering how I could take much more of these beasites when I finally pedalled away from them. The i-center here had a version of the Maori legend about sandfiles set up next to a big rack of completely ineffectual insect potions, right next to the snake oil. In this version the Goddess, fearful that the humans might mistakenly believe they were in paradise and want to live for ever, sent the sandflies to remind them of their mortality. The deeper truth of this bit of mythology became apparent as I made my way up the Haast river gorge. The incredible beauty of the the snow-capped mountains jutting out of the dense rainforest is not possible to describe adequately in words--at least for me and my limited linguistic abilities. I tried to capture some of it with my little camera, but technology also fails to capture the granduer of the place. It really is true that around each bend in the road is yet another incredible vista.

About 50km into the day, just before the big climn to the top of Haast pass I stopped at a DOC site called 'pleasant flat'. Pedallers' Paradise lists its amenities as 'toilet,table, sandflies'. Now sondflies are everywhere here in this part of the south island (18 varieties in fact) so what Nigel meant was the place is completely unsuited for humans not wearing a full body prophylactic. Somehow I managed to cook a bit of pasta, to a photot of the amazing glacier and fled at a brisk 15kph. Just after my lunch battle I past a very lean German cyclist going the other direction. We stopped breifly and talked across the road. This guy was completing the 140km from Wanaka to Haast in a single day! 100km the day before nearly did me in. Anyway he mentioned that I had 'a little bit of work ahead'. No kidding. The climb up to the top of Haast pass was the most difficult uphill I've done so far. On one memorable 2km stretch I took almost an hour, stopping every couple of hundred meters to take yet another photo of yet another waterfall and try to get my heart rate down. It was almost 6:00pm when I finally limped into Makarora, the first place with a roof since Haast village. Fortunantely the roof covered a marvelous little pub attached to a shower. And thetre were almost no sandflies, paradise indeed.