The first bit was fairly straight forward. We spotted the small sign that signalled the turn off the main highway. After that, "5.9 km Rd on left, Riwaka Valley Left Branch. Drive straight ahead - DO NOT CROSS BRIDGE!" Sure enough, we saw the sign for Riwaka Valley Left Branch and turned onto it. Here we hit our first obstacle. Within ten metres of turning onto the road, we had to cross a bridge. Another review of the note made it seem as though the directions must be referring to a bridge further along since we still had 8km to go. After a few hundred metres, the road changed to gravel. We passed a few farm houses, then some grazing cattle, and then it was just us and the road.
As we chugged along in Nico's station wagon, the path started to get a bit bumpy. There were fences on either side of the road with signs that showed we were surrounded by the private property of Riwaka Forestry Industries. That didn't phase us, as there are heaps of hikes and points of interest in New Zealand that require you to cut across farmland. We hit a few cattle gates that needed to be manually opened, but that was normal too. Further along, the road was so bumpy that the ground was loudly scraping the undercarriage of the station wagon. It had also rained recently, and the puddles were fairly deep in some places. At first, the off-road adventure was funny. But the road kept getting worse, and the noises coming from under the car were awful. We were also very aware that we were well out of cell service - if the car stopped running, we'd have to walk a long way back to the main road to get help. Nico kept driving as the rest of us began hugging ourselves with pained expressions on our faces. After the car had a particularly prolonged painful connection with the ground, we started to get out to lighten the carriage as Nico drove over the dips and hop back in on the other side.
We finally came to the first place we were able to turn the car around. Rachel suggested we walk the rest of the way. Nico looked at his odometer and said he didn't want to walk the last 4km, and was willing to keep driving. So we kept going for about 400 more metres when the road abruptly ended. We got out of the car to look around, and Rachel suddenly pointed out where the tire tracks continued- on the other side of the river. Welp. A+ for effort. We tried. Time to turn back.
Nico had to drive in reverse down the narrow, horribly uneven road with mud and pools of water threatening to trap the car everywhere. Once we got out of the forest, things started to become horribly funny. We started to point out to eachother, with the clarity of hindsight, all the glaring signs we had missed or ignored. These were things like how the road was obviously only made for tractors, or the multiple signs along the road with phrases like "Private property" or 'Multiple Hazard Areas". We also had squeezed past a fallen tree that was laying across the road. Best of all: we had crossed 3 bridges on our way to the middle of nowhere.
Rachel quietly pushed the paper with directions to the back seat to confirm that we had misread them: we hadn't realized that the directions only wanted us to use Riwaka Road Left as a marker. We were supposed to continue past, driving, as the note says, straight ahead.
When we finally got back to the main road, we drove down the nicely paved path to the well-signed carpark full of other tourists. The car-wrecking adventure was worth it. The water really was crystal clear, and ran over quartz rock that was surrounded by mossy green boulders and forest. New Zealand, you've outdone yourself yet again.
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