Story and photos by David Coxon
The only information I had about our first destination, the Makuri Gorge, was from a brief write up on a website promoting the Woodville area and describing the gorge as being about 30 minutes from Woodville on the Pahiatua to Pongaroa road.
After much poring over the NZ topo map on my GPS I finally located the gorge near the little settlement of Makuri, and marked it with a way-point. Our other nearby destination, Pipinui Falls, was described as being six kms past Makuri on Coonoor Rd, with the comment ‘you can’t miss the sign’. Lacking any more useful GPS information, I was relying on the odometer to find the falls.
It was a gentle, easy climb up to the Makuri Gorge, where the valley narrowed to sheer bush-covered cliffs with the road running about 20m above the river. Based on the comments on the website about photographing the rocks and rapids in the gorge I was expecting a clearly identifiable car park and maybe even a viewing platform.
However we never did find the Pipinui Falls and have surmised that as the falls were “through a gate and across a paddock” as described by the website, the landowner may have got tired of people traipsing over his fields and removed the signs.
Our first goal after a leisurely start on Sunday morning was to visit Waihi Falls, accessing them from a road I had never used, Oporae Rd running across from Weber Rd out of Dannevirke. This was another quiet, isolated and picturesque back road, sealed until just before the turnoff onto Waihi Falls Rd.
The falls were much fuller than I expected given that we were at the end of a late summer dry period. Being the first time I had been here in the morning rather than late afternoon, I spent quite a bit of time taking advantage of the different sun position to satisfy my photography passion before taking the at times steep but not very long climb back up to the cars then heading to Wimbledon via the unsealed Waihi Valley road back to the seal at SH52.
To read the full story in the September 2016 issue of NZ4WD go to Zinio.com (August 22) or purchase your own hard copy at the Adrenalin store.
