Some of the roads travelled in search of good landscape images can be fairly rough, occasionally disappearing altogether. This is a typical country road which runs between the Rakaia River and Lake Coleridge, heading towards Algidus Station (a famous high-country station, the focus of a well-known book “A river rules my life” by Mona Anderson).
Eventually it peters out on the river flats. To get to Mt Algidus Station itself you must cross the mighty Rakaia. This gentleman had already made the trip to 3 times that day.
“How deep does it get?” I asked him. “Not too bad, below the door handles” was his reply. He set off,
zigzagging across the braided river for quite awhile eventually emerging on the other side. From this shot you can see that he wasn’t exaggerating.
When a stream carries a lot of shingle it’s often not practical to have a bridge. Some of these fords can be a trap for the unwary. I met a Spanish couple right out near Erewhon with a large campervan stuck fast in one of them. The van had a large overhang between the rear axle and its stern which had grounded, taking most of the weight off the rear wheels. It was the first real test for my 4WD, which did great job in pulling them out. It was fortunate because I was stuck on the wrong side of the blocked ford. Here’s a shot of the start of their return journey, after some landscaping had been carried out on the ford (with the kitchen tidy).
