NZ travelogue: Sawyers Stream

During our drive up to the Aoraki Mt Cook national park, we came across several such bridges built across dry river beds. The narrowness of the bridges meant that traffic from one direction will always have the right of way but traffic from the other direction is required to stop and wait for the road to clear before proceeding with the crossing.

Rather intrigued with this, I stopped our car at a place called Sawyers Stream to have a closer look at the river bed. Dry as a bone and full of gravel that gave the river bed and banks that unique whitish-grey look. Does it ever get wet here? Does a river actually flow during the wetter periods of the year? Or is it perpetually dry?

But what I do know is that Sawyers Stream joins up eventually with the braided river system that flows into Lake Pukaki, that uniquely turquoise-coloured lake in New Zealand's South Island. Even from Google Maps, the colour of this lake's water is unmistakeable, what more to look at it for ourselves. It was so unlike anything that we had ever seen before.