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Updated: May 13, 2025
Here a similar scene was being enacted, and here, in common with many other diggers, we were obliged to remain for several days owing to severe weather setting in. Miller and Gooche's station was situated at the junction of a tributary stream with the Waitaki, at the entrance of a rugged and mountainous gorge.
On the morrow, ten more monotonous miles to the banks of the Rakaia. This river is one of the largest in the province, second only to the Waitaki. It contains about as much water as the Rhone above Martigny, perhaps even more, but it rather resembles an Italian than a Swiss river. With due care, it is fordable in many places, though very rarely so when occupying a single channel.
Some of the principal rivers such as the Rakaia, Rangatata and Waitaki, are at all times formidable. The Rakaia bed, for example, is, or was, nearly half a mile wide, a vast expanse of shingle, full of treacherous quicksands, in which the course of the different streams is altered after every fresh.
Our horses were a trifle too fat for good condition, and we feared to hurry them the first day, so we made an early halt at Mahiki, only a twenty miles stage; but the next day they took us on to Waitaki Ferry, past a splendid bush, and so into the heart of the hill country.
There was no road, and but for a portion of the way up the valley of the Waitaki only a rough bullock dray track leading to some isolated sheep and cattle stations, beyond which there was literally no track at all.
Soon after, our weary bodies were strewn over the floor wherever we could individually select a fairly even spot, and the landlady, I believe, retired into the bar. The following morning we put ourselves, horses, and baggage safely across the Waitaki, and by 10 o'clock arrived in Dunedin.
We rose before daybreak, and ere the sun had well appeared had eaten our primitive breakfast and were in the saddle for the march. On the evening of the third day we reached the Waitaki river, which separates Canterbury from Otago, and is the largest in the South Island.
The Waitaki was never fordable at this point, and passengers were ferried across in a small boat behind which the horses were swum.
The following day we returned to Davis's, where we found the bullocks had arrived the night before, and Davis, after a laugh at our misadventures, returned us the £25, and the same evening we left for Dunedin. We camped some ten miles further down the Waitaki, with a very eccentric personage in the form of an old retired clergyman of the Church of England.
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