Under Pancake Rocks

A week or two back I decided it really was time to start climbing again. I had subscribed to the West Coast Alpine Club several months ago for just that reason. Thus I made plans to head to Greymouth and have a crack at their rock climbing wall. I’m not much of a mixer when new to a group so I attempted to rope in another bod or two to keep me company. Not that I had a lot of success. Peoples work schedules didn’t suit, or it was going to be too late by the time we got home and some didn’t want to drive to an activity like this and then have to drive (1.5 hrs) home again afterwards.

I nagged Neil fairly hard though as I thought a) he’d be persuadable and b) that he would have fewer reasons to make excuses not to join in.

‘I’d love to come but I can’t because Lauren is making me paint the house,’ he complained.

         

          ‘Not at this time of the night she’s not,’ I retorted.

          ‘You’d be surprised,’ he countered.

          ‘Indeed I would be surprised. Very surprised. Anyway, what happens if I fall and die,’ I queried adding a hint of emotional blackmail to my nagging weaponry.

          ‘Can’t tonight, definitely next time though,’ came back the reply, ‘and if Neil doesn’t want to come, you and I can buddy up.

          ‘What?!’ I thought to myself and then realised that the last couple of responses had been penned by Lauren herself. Opps! I could sooo easily have put my foot in it there.

          However the poison dart slowly worked its magic and a week or two later Neil phones.

          ‘We’ve got to go climbing!’ He declares.

          ‘Sure,’ says I. ‘Where and when?’

          “Punakaiki and tomorrow of course!’ Never does much by halves does Neil.

‘And we’ll throw in a side-dish of cave prospecting for good measure.’ Whereupon he proceeded to describe how he’d spied a couple of interesting divets in the cliff down on the Punikaiki beach from his drone that he thought would be worth making the effort to get to.

          I said ‘let’s start at 10am,’ he said ‘let’s make it 11:30.' I’m thinking ‘slacker, how hard can it possibly be to get your lazy behind out of bed at a reasonable hour, get organised and simply be there,’ and then far from getting away early (as I had intended), I was instead late. So late in fact that I was still at the Op Shop trying on a variety of trousers for the climbing when I should have been on the road.

          In the end however I made good time and on arriving at the carpark specified, wandered down to the toilets and then, figuring I still had a spare 10-20 minutes to fill in, tottled off to the beach and check out access options from the base of the sea-cliffs.

          After getting back to the van I made a start on organising my gear, when after a few minutes Neil phones.

          ‘Where are you?’ He asks, in the tone of voice you use when you’re on time and someone who normally give you cheek about being late is in fact late themselves.

          ‘Oh hi!’ I pipe up cheerily, ‘I’m in the carpark.’

          ‘Which one?’

          ‘The big one, where are you?

          ‘In the big carpark.’

          ‘Oh you must be in the one down at the other end of the village,’ I exclaim. ‘I thought you said to meet in the northern one,’ I added.

          ‘I did… where are you, I’ve been waiting here for 20 minutes?!’

          At which point I stepped back from the van and glanced about the carpark only to see Neil a few paces away – on his phone facing the carpark entrance and waving his arms in an agitated manner.

          I gathered up the last of my gear, hoping I had a full set of the various bits and pieces that would be required. It can be a bit of challenge swapping disciplines when a bunch of the gear is used for both. I’d decided to change to a climbing harness despite the fact that we were going cave prospecting, so all my carabiners had to stripped off my caving harness (and or located from the four corners of my house whence I’d scattered them – for cleaning, drying, practice rigging, holding up the clothesline etc.) and much the same for SRT gear and the like.

The Beach head

          We made our way round the tourist pathways and found a good vantage point from which to hatch a plan. From here we could clearly see numerous intriguing shadows that whet our appetite. We assessed the cliff for anchor potential, overall height, ease of getting to and how the rappel down might pan out. Knowing that almost none of this would actually help us once we left the track, but we always do it and feel good about being so diligent.

          The path we forged from the paved walkway to the top of the abseil, was rather long, drawn-out and somewhat tortuous. Many was the time that going under, through or over what was in front of us was neither practical nor indeed possible. There were no tracks, no spaces between the trees/shrubbery/vegetation and oft times there was no ground beneath us either. We were obliged to glide nimbly over nothingness on more than one occasion, trusting in the flimsy noodle-like vines of Keikei to hold us aloft.

Neil descends

          Having finally bashed through to the cliff edge where we thought our best chance of a reasonable descent was (which happily we nailed with an uncanny precision), we built an anchor amongst the dead Nikau palms, rigged a rope and Neil slithered from view. The rope went slack and a faint and entirely indistinct call wafted up with the salted air. I installed myself on the rope and followed suit. As I was lowering myself down, the surf was still sweeping in right underneath me. I waited for a break, dropped and ran up the steeply sloping gravely sand. It was a fine idea to be moving away from the ocean and slightly uphill, but I was also aware that I was running into a dead-end which if a large wave were to follow me in, would leave no room for manoeuvring or indeed breathing.

Hemmed in by the tide

  

A foam-strewn beach appeared momentarily before us and we scarpered out like kids escaping a crowded vehicle after an over-long journey. Haphazardly we tore off to one side glancing hurriedly into the shadows before darting hastily back to our semi-safe haven. Dodging the waves we ran back and forth across the foam as if we might suddenly catch a cave unawares and seize upon it as if it were some naughty little leprechaun. 

Racing into Action

Fortunately about this time the sea seemed to take a short breather and stayed further down the continental shelf so we could search about in a methodical and appropriately adulting manner. Of course you know we then got caught out. Neil had just climbed a rock for a better view of what might be hidden above us when the tide surged around about me and over into my gumboots. Neil (having waiting an unnecessary moment) then gave me a hand up onto this little stone pedestal-isle. From here we could see a very promising lead, and also see that we were unlikely to be able to gain access to it with the gear we had with us. 

So Close and yet so Far

Helping Hand

Prime Prospect

When it came time to re-trace our steps back to the beach I managed to get away in between the wetting sea-kisses, but Neil, having chosen a different route down and taken longer to get there was caught hovering on the edge of the rock with the brine breaking beneath him and eventually had to simply to leap in or risk that the incoming tide would make him swim for it.

Leaping Ashore

Having ascended the rope (rather carefully as it had a number of dodgy rub points), it came time to leave our drop-in point and return to civilisation. Neil determined that a new and vastly superior return route would be found and trod. At first this did not go well, suffice to say we were still in the same localised area some 10 minutes later. But with a modicum of persistence and only a little bad language a break-through was made and progress fell into our laps. I'm suspicious that Nature pervertedly likes to have the last laugh where possible and soon enough the way forward, faltered, failed, shriveled up and floated away into the clear Autumn sky. 

An enormous flax bush barred our way. Neil tried climbing up into it only to be repelled nonchalantly by it. Refusing to be treated with such scorn, Neil instructed me to ‘stand clear’ while he prepared to gather some momentum in what was probably the world’s shortest run-up ever. Two paces back, two paces forward with acceleration and he was airborne.  Diving full-body length up into the flax Neil then rather surprisingly shot straight through it and tumbled head-first out onto the asphalt of the walkway unseen on the far side, scattering delicately-framed Asians and their cameras/phones/selfie sticks in several directions.

          I had not brought a cave-bag/back-pack with me and so had worn all my gear on my person, into and now out from the exploration. Instead of covertly tiptoeing along incognito as Neil was doing (with all his gear tidied away into a solitary, discrete, well-camouflaged, miniature Joe-90 cave-bag), I announced at a brazen 50 paces that I WAS GOING SOMEWHERE. Or at least that I had just been somewhere. My helmet perched atop me like a beacon, lights glaring and GoPro camera to the fore, blinkin’ ready for action. A dozen ’biners jingled, cords and wires stuck out from me in odd places and the strangely shaped ordinances that swung from my loins looked worryingly like devices belonging to a medieval torture chamber. I rattled musically when I walked as if I were a ‘fine lady of Banbury Cross upon a white horse…’ Indeed I walked like some bow-legged cowboy, or recently-landed sailor trying to find an on-shore rhythm that minimised both the bruising to my thighs and the atonal syncopated racket of my chiming, peacock-hued paraphernalia.

When we had arrived there were fortunately not many people about and we had snuck down to the exploration zone virtually undetected. Not so on the way back out, we meet people left, right and centre. Quizzical looks, stops and stares, tittering under hands, pointing small children, crying babies, worrying tourists and frowning DoC staff. No, there was no secrecy to be had with me looking like this.

Then Neil bumped into someone he knew who had a lot of words he wanted use up. Unhappily his friend was engaged in a little light gardening directly in front of a popular café when he saw us and felt in no way inclined to move off somewhere more discrete for the duration of the verbal download. Buses hove to and emptied payloads of tourists here for their coffee fixes; unfit locals, their bikes permanently in low gear, struggled slowly past; seemingly stray dogs sniffed warily at my now dirtied and curiously interesting trousers, and still this man had more words. I tried to edge away but was trapped by the gardener-friend’s wheelbarrow full of weeds, trimmings and sharp pointy implements.

          The tourists returned to their buses streaming past us, found their way onto the wrong bus and squeezed past us again to reach the correctly numbered bus; dogs sniffed their way back home steering a circumspect curve around me; the cyclists, now red in the face and still in first gear, wheezed as they passed by us again striving to complete their circuits, and still the man had not run out of words. 

I wondered about simply disrobing on the spot, but I wasn’t sure if this might simply add fuel to the fire of my already brightly blazing embarrassment. I wondered if I should look into a career in advertising wearing a sandwich-board. I wondered if the tourism statistics for Punakaiki would require updating, ‘x’ million enjoyed viewing the blow holes, but ‘y’ million were perplexed by a new strangely-attired apparition on the main street. I wondered how long was it going to be until Kieran McK turned up, sensing that we must have been onto something really big with all this fuss and attention.

          They say all good things must come to an end, of course I knew this wasn’t going to help me, as this wasn’t in the least bit good. Never-the-less the gardener-friend-orator did eventually reach the bottom of his word-well and while his lips kept on moving out of long-established habit, no more words came tumbling out. We smiled warmly, waved a little wave and made good our escape back to our vehicles.

          Yes, we did go rock climbing after this, but that is a whole other story for a whole other day…

A video of the exploration may be viewed here.