Had a bit of a mission today. First we had the obligatory climbing session at Paynes, then we took an afternoon off and went to Wharariki Beach, which is about an hour northwest. It’s accessible by a long, circuitous dirt road, then a hike along a path winding through grassy hills, forests and dunes. Amazing place. There weren’t very many people save for Alicia and I and our friends Greg, Andrew, Sylv and this crazy French dude named Pierre.
Andrew’s recently become excited about geocaching, which is basically a treasure hunt for adults. You pick some caches off of www.geocaching.com and use your GPS to find them. One of them was buried somewhere on the beach, so we took his GPS and wandered around until we found a small tupperware filled with random goodies buried beneath some plants growing out of a dune. You’re supposed to take a trinket with you out of the cache and leave something else inside it. We also explored a random cave on the beach, but after we got a few hundred feet in (in the pitch dark) we heard some animals breathing and snorting — probably sea lions. With big teeth. So we bolted.
Pierre returned to the beach the next day and spent an afternoon digging clams out of the sand. He became covered in mud, but he also needed to do some grocery shopping for dinner. We ran into him at the market, and instead of dripping mud all over the store, he was wandering around in a pair of red boxer shorts and an undershirt. He emerged with white wine, parsley and other cooking ingredients and proceeded to cook clams for the entire camp. A bit sandy, but tasty too.
