Siberia Experience, Scenic Flight, Bush Walk and Jetboat Safari

A day never to forget. It starts with a coffeestop in a Salmonhouse. Not many people there, but a lot of Salmon. Next stop was at a small river. We just enjoyed the nature and getting back we could walk throught the forest instead of going by bus. I decided to walk the small tour and after that we all took a tour called: Roaring Billy walls in te Wahipounamu. That would take us in 20 minutes in the native forest. Then a lunch and we arrived in Makarora at 2 pm. We would have the Siberia Experience today. First we have to pay.... of course. Because it is a little bit expensive not all the travellers are going to do this. We were with 10 of our group and 2 others. There were 2 cessna's waiting for us. The yellow one was already waiting for us and the second one was still in the air bringing an other group into the mountains.

I got in the first one with 5 others and we had our Scenic Flight.

It is very very beautiful to fly over the native forest of New Zealand. The flight was 25 minutes. After the landing on grass high in the mountains we had to wait for the second flight. That arrived after 30 minutes. Now we could go for the bushwalk. We had to cross a river that was shallow, but deep enough to take the shoes of and were shorts. We were adviced to wear slippers due to the slippery of the stones at the bottom. The water was very cold, I guess around 5 degrees C. So I went in front and crossed the river without a problem. I brought a towel and dright my legs and feet and put on my shoes again. Most people forgot there towels so mine was as wet as....

This was an easy cross.

What they didn't tell us that we had to cross another creek with a lot of stones to use as a bridge. Unfortunately the waterlevel was quit high and there were not so many stones but they were very slippery. So using the sticks of the older people we helped eachother across. One person on this side, one in the middle and one at the other side. Tricky but we did it.

Now we can go for the 2 hour walk down to the river. It was a very quiet walk, the only thing you could here was the river. We had a few picture-stops and at 6pm we were at the meeting point. There should be 2 speedboats to pic us up, but nothing there. But after 10 minutes they were there. We got in the boats and in a very high speed 90k/h we had a great experience. Sometimes we did a 360 degrees turn, and some persons were very wet (and cold). At the end we we were brought back to our special homes. We took showers and dry clothes and the buffet was ready for us.

The lodges were different from what we are use to. These were build as a triangle. Inside it was seperated in two compartments, each with 2 or 3 beds. They put 2 people in every lodge so place enough to sleep. We met there 2 girls, we called them miss Canada and Germany, who arrived there on bike!! There were cold and wanted to put up there tents. Our tourleader offered them a compartment in his lodge, so they could have a warm shower and a bed for 1 night. We talked and drinked till 1am. We had to buy some beers first, because after 10pm everything is closed. This was a marvelous day.