At any given time, you can pretty much put money on the fact that one of us has just lost something. It’s like all of our belongings have legs. Ironically, the only thing we own that doesn’t actually like to constantly move... is our car (but in all fairness, a new battery should fix that) Sabina likes to play a game where she puts her phone down approximately 300 times a day in the most obscure locations, only to realise it’s not in her pocket once she’s left the house/shop/car park/town... and don’t get us started on Liam - apparently he has a ‘place’ for everything, which sounds brilliant until something isn’t in it’s place, and then the whole street has to be turned upside down until it’s found... only for him to realise later that in reality, he just moved it’s place the day before, and then forgot about doing so.
Honestly though, we’re quite organised people as far as daily life is concerned. Usually we have a plan for the whole day and try to get what we can out of the days that brings us nice weather, and on the off rainy day, you’ll still find us making the most of the opportunity to stay inside and catch up on our work. Saturday the 2nd of March however was not one of these ‘work’ days. In fact, the sky was so blue, and the sun so warm that we just had to go to the beach. Now not much gets said before Liam’s morning coffee, so after this, and over breakfast we had a discussion and made the decision to go back to Waitakere Ranges.
The first planned stop of the day was Lake Wainamu, but of course the Ranges are so packed full of things to see that we ended up stopping along the way as usual. If you’re heading to the ranges from Auckland you’ll pass a particular stop where you can get up close with one of the Kauri trees. As we’ve mentioned before, the Kauri are seriously impressive and certainly worth taking a couple of minutes to see - this one can be found on google maps and there is space to park directly across the road. Even knowing what we we’re in for, this one surpassed our expectations when we saw it.
With our next stop we weren’t so lucky; another kilometre or so down the road is the fairy falls track, which requires dropping a pin on google maps to find the exact start point. Unfortunately, this track was still closed due to Kauri dieback so we ended up going straight to the lake from here, and this is another one of those locations where you need to be sure to enter ‘Lake Wainamu carpark’ into the satnav (otherwise you’ll end up looking at a gate to a private road).
From the carpark, It was an interesting walk to the water because unlike most places, the easy route there requires getting your feet wet. There is no road access, and the path to and from the lake is well... not exactly a path. In fact it’s a shallow stream that takes about twenty minutes to walk, with warm-ish water and small fish that swim past your feet. We took this route on the way back from the lake and it’s brilliant, but for the way there we chose the more difficult, dryer route: accross the sand dunes.
It’s worth doing both routes despite the hard work as the scenery is amazing. It’s hard to understand how it’s even possible to be standing on sand dunes right in front of a lake, with a forest to one side, and green rolling hills on the other. One thing to note here is that you’ll absolutely need shoes to walk across the dunes - there is no shade at all here, so the volcanic sand gets baked in the sun all day. Liam thought he’d run down one of the big dunes barefoot (cue the facepalm) and then had to crawl back up whilst burning his feet, which took a long time... and yes it was literally the funniest thing that happened all week, but this is another one of those things we can’t really recommend.
That was a few of the most painful minutes of my life - it was the hottest sand I’ve ever felt and my feet were sore for days after... but yes of course I’ll probably do it again.
At the lake, the water isn’t quite crystal clear but still very inviting, so It didn’t take us long to go for a swim. It’s almost like being at the beach, and there were a few other people there too enjoying the sun, most of whom also took a dip in the lake. There’s a loop around the lake through some forest that took us around two hours to complete, including stopping at a waterfall too. The water is pretty cold (like all the waterfalls here) but it’s worth bearing the temperature for.
Even though the water was really cold, I found the courage to go in, motivated by the amazing shots we could possibly get ... well, at least, I created some good memories.
At one side of the lake is a little wooden pier. It looks like it was built to moor a small boat there, but is used more for tourists that like to run and jump off the end. If you do a quick internet search of the lake, you’re more than likely to see heaps of photo’s of people jumping from the end into the water - it’s like one of those ‘must have’ shots. Being unique people, we did exactly the same as everyone else, and set up our camera at the end of the pier before running and jumping in, making sure to flail our arms in the air like crazy people whilst doing so.
We did this a few times before deciding a headcam video would look amazing, but on our second attempt at doing this, the headstrap came loose, and like a stone, our GoPro made it’s way to the bottom of the lake. At this point the lake is only around 5 metres deep, and it’s possible to swim down to the bottom, as Liam did many times but with no luck. The only problem is that after around 1 metre visibility is precisely zero, as is the temperature.
I can’t even explain how bad it is at the bottom of the lake... usually I can hold my breath for a long time but for some reason, down there I managed for about three seconds.
After two hours of trying to find the camera we had to face the fact that we were nearly £500 out of pocket (once taken into account the memory card, headstrap etc). Despite trying every possible method to retrieve it, we had no luck... not the best end to the day.
So if you’re planning a trip to the lake and you’re feeling lucky, take a dive or even some fishing equipment. You may just find our GoPro, or possibly even someone elses, because we’re pretty sure that we’re not the first, and certainly not the last to lose our camera to the murky waters of lake Wainamu... but hey, at least we won’t forget where it is.
Up next: A series of unfortunate events
