Friday night down the Old Spotted Dog he'd have all and sundry in the palm of his hand, enthralling us with tales of what he'd had in his sandwiches that week. If tipsy, he might go on to enthuse about his boss's maroon Volkswagen Golf, but he knew his limits so would generally stick within his comfort zone of egg mayo and tuna sweetcorn.
John wasn't a bad person, just extraordinarily dull.
So I couldn't help smiling today as we hiked up Takaka Hill to visit the mouth of the biggest cave in the southern hemisphere - Harwood's Hole.
The cave is everything that its namesake back in England isn't: Deep, awe-inspiring and totally captivating. Again, our little camera couldn't do justice to the place. But with a 70 metre wide mouth and a 400 metre drop from top to bottom, I think you probably get the picture.
Great accoustics too, 'Toon Army' has rarely sounded so good.
Earlier in the day we'd driven past a sign saying 'PuPu Springs 3km'. This intrigued us, was it some king of geological curiosity, or just the local sewage works. Thankfully, it turned out to be a series of small lakes fed by eight natural springs and - according to the blurb on the infomation board - this is the second clearest water on the planet (the clearest being somewhere in the Antartic).
They'd built a nifty viewing window into the banks of one of the lakes to prove their point, and sure enough, you could see right across to the vegetation under the water's surface at the far end, some 60 metres away.
Up until that point, I'd been PuPu-ing their claim.
1 comment:
ahve got car!
John Harwood.
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