Thursday 11th March

Today was a bit cooler with early light showers. We set off in the morning up a 17kms track to the Oparara basin, which is a limestone area just north of Karamea. We first explored the Box Canyon and Crazy Paving caves – fortunately we had a torch! The caves, which apart from containing stalactites, also had spiders’ egg sacks hanging from the cave roof; these were from New Zealand's largest spider, the 15 centimetre harmless gradungular spider, which lives in the caves. We saw one adult which scuttled away from us into the dark before we had time to take a photo! We then walked to the largest of several limestone arches - the Oparara Arch, which is 219 metres long with sides 79 metres apart and a roof 43 metres above the river that carved it (pic only shows approach to it). This was an impressive hike through the jungle – the only down side being the odd (lots) of insect bites – they obviously could not read the instructions on the insect repellent we used!! We then backtracked to go down the west coast as far as Hokitika. On the way we stopped at the Pancake Rocks which are shown in the attached photo. These take a real pounding from the sea, which was producing some very big waves.