After this little playground we explored the area and found many other fun spots. They were not worth taking photos for. As I was saying the mud was not as abundant as we first hoped.
We went further east, downstream, in search of a
more challenging area. 
When I said
challenging I didn't quite have this in mind. We were tossing up who
should go first. Somehow I ended up going in first. So,
1...2...3...GO! VROOM....VROOOOOM........SPLAT!!!! I should've known! If I
wasn't looking forward to cleaning up I positively *loath* the
thought by now. Sarah looked like she was having fun. Oh well, at
least she thought it was funny.
After tossing up between winching or snatch rope
towing we decided against using the winch.
Time to
pull out the snatch rope. Damn, Sarah is still grinning......
After getting everything hooked up it was time for
the tow 
No worries mate! Straight out of the
nasty and incredibly smelly crap!
That was that! I suppose I can't always stay in
the car every trip but one can only hope. There was a trip when I
didn't have to get out once but obviously this was not to be on this
trip. Later on we found another track that looked innocent enough.
Craig volunteered to go in first (hehehe...fool!). And true enough,
his front diff got stuck!
Does this picture remind you
of a certain cartoon elephant? :-) Yes, that few inches less got him
into trouble. Who said length doesn't matter? And don't tell me it's
all in the way you use it!
Unfortunately my tow rope was not long enough so
he had to winch himself out. 
We met a rather
shiny LR D90 while Craig was winching. After Craig went through the
D90 went straight past where Craig got stuck with no problems. Yeah!
Go Rover!
After this I gave Gareth a turn to drive the
Rangie. After all he had to get out and take pictures. He happily
hooned around the area 
and came back at
what seemed to be a hundred miles per hour.
We went for some more for a short while and then
decided to call it the day. After looking at what the cars were like
at this point 
we decided to find a nice stream that
was not too deep and drove through it as fast as we could. It worked
quite well. The bottom half of the vehicles were well rinsed tires
scrubbed by the river gravels. If you can't see what's out the window
in this photo, don't worry, neither could we during the drive :-)
Nature's drive through car wash.
Then, with steaming tailpipes, we headed home towards the sunset. Actually we didn't, we kinda went south but it just wouldn't sound as good.
Well, that's all folks! For now, anyway. Stay tuned for futher New Zealand off-road adventures.