We were woken up by a gentle sound of the rain and singing of some birds just outside our window. The rain stopped, while we were having breakfast. However while riding north we got some more rain later. We didn't take the same route north, that we'd come south, and again chose wrong. Flat straight and windy. I should have read the topography of the map more carefully.

From Reefton we turned to Buller Gorge. This was the same road we rode south, but it didn't matter. This was a kind of road, one could ride hundred times. We stopped to see the longest swing bridge in NZ. The storm had shaken the bridge so badly, that two of it's suspension ropes were loose, and you couldn't cross it. There were also booms, and signs preventing it in addition to one's common sense. Elina went a bit further downstream for taking a photo. She shouted something to me, naturally, in Finnish, and then we heard someone, from the road direction to comment: "Ah, fellow countrymen." We met a Finnish couple, who were going to drive around the NZ in only two weeks with a rented small Toyota. They had almost five days less time than us, and we didn't see everything we wanted, and still were in a hurry. Poor them. I wished them luck.

While we were chatting in Finnish, one arab-looking weird guy appeared from nowhere, and asked whether we were Finnish. When I asked, how did he guess, he told he had been working three years in a volunteer-based working camp in Israel, that was led by a Finnishman. He recognised Finnish language, when he heard it spoken, but couldn't say anything else than "good morning" in Finnish himself. Confused we continued our ride towards Mapua Leisure Motor Park. We chose it, since it was only about 150 kilometers from Picton, and also since it was "clothing optional" and sounded interesting.

On our way north, we crossed the Hope Saddle, very sharp ridge with serpentine roads up and down. When we came there, I remembered, someone in Nzbikers mailing list had warned me about some Saddle, that is slippery, when wet. Then we saw some warning signs of slippery road, and of course it was raining. Whe I worried that, we rode past the lookout place of the saddle top, but anyway, it was so rainy, that we wouldn't have seen anything. After a while we found one small gravel road following the ridge on our left. I wondered, if it was another lookout, so we turned there, and rode it some hundreds of meters. It looked very Finnish with crisscrossing small gravel roads in a forest. Then we came back to the main road. I wished I would've had the whole day to explore this area.

When we came to the Mapua Leisure Park, it was our first, and definitely the last motor camp. As Finns we were used to nudity, so the fact, that Mapua was clothing optional didn't bother us. But the owners had made this CO-paradise (as described in their leaflet) to a big business. So there were 1400 people, and only maybe seven of them nude on the beach. There were some giggling teenagers on the beach watching the few nudes, and the nature of the motor park came out in a form of barbequing noisy people with their noisy children. We had a Chalet, an A-shaped cabin, with our own kitchen facilities. Elina also swam in the sea, but I didn't, since I didn't want to treat my sunburnt shoulders with a salty water.