Saturday 21st November. We start the day with no particular plans except to drive towards Twizel and as the day turns out we manage to pack in being on the footplate of a steam engine, Hacketts bungy Jump and prospecting for gold. Not bad for a couple of old codgers. It worked like this. We are driving back along highway 6 in the late morning feeling it was time for a coffee when we see a sign to "The Kingston Flyer Steam Train". Kingston is at the southern end of Lake Wakatipu and there is a single track line that runs beside the road down to Invercargill although so far as we can gather the steam train only goes a few miles down the line. The train is standing outside the station with steam up and nobody on the footplate. There are no fences and it is possible to walk all around the engine so yours truly grabs his chance and climbs aboard the engine to have a closer look at the controls etc. Marilyn having kittens particularly when the intercom in the cab crackles into life and asks the man on the engine to get down until the driver arrives. I have been spotted but not before the camera went click. The train is not due to leave for at least an hour so we decide to move on. In the village there is a house owned by a "Wheel Nut". See photo of his garden fence. Next stop Hacketts world famous bungy jump from the bridge over the Kawarau gorge. Thought I might get Marilyn to have a go if I blindfolded her but the jump captain thought she looked too frail and wrinkly and was worried that she might fall to pieces at the bottom when the rope pulled her up so we had to give it a miss. Of course I was all ready to have a go but didn't like to do so without M so reluctantly we drove on. Next stop the Kawarau Gorge Mining Centre. To get to the Centre we had to cross a footbridge high over the gorge which was a small victory for M. The Gold mining continued here for about 100 years and was last worked in 1969. Many of the early miners were Chinese and their simple dwellings/shelters have been reconstructed which give a good idea of how basic it was in the early days when there was no bridge across the gorge and everything had to be transported across in a crate suspended from a high wire. Water power provided the energy to drive the ore crushing machinery and we were given a demonstration of how it worked by the son of one of the last men to work the mine. He handed us a couple of nice sized nuggets of gold but I was not able to trouser them without his noticing. All very interesting.
We have passed through very varied landscapes - the most extreme being vast tracts of treeless ranges followed by great open planes irrigated by watering booms on wheels in spans of about 75 feet. The average number of linked booms has been 12 but we have seen one rig of 22 booms linked in line giving a total length of about 1650 feet. Seriously big operation. In this area the roads are lined with wild lupins that are infull bloom at the moment - the photo does not do them justice. M reckons that they have lined 60 Kms of road. The wild broom is also veryprolific making mountain sides ablaze in yellow. M has done most of the driving today - a doddle in this traffic. One car every 10 Kms!!