Photography is BACK!

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Vocabulary lesson for the day:
Student's tan - the result of spending a good amount of time in the sun without a shirt but with a backpack on (sorry, no pictures).

So we've been making our trip of the West Coast of the South Island and are almost through with it. From the glacier area, we drove along the coast and stopped in a town called Greymouth just for the day. We went on a tour of the Montieth's Brewery, which was a better tour than the Speight's one we did earlier - there were only 6 people on the tour and it covered more things - plus they have a really clever engineer working for them so many of their machines were pieced together from old trucks and other old machines. At the end we were forced to drink half a glass of each of their 7 varieties before being given about 10-15 minutes free reign of their bar. This was quite enjoyable. Afterwards we made our daily pb&j sandwiches, ate lunch, explored the town, and did some shopping before continuing our drive up the coast.

We stayed that night at Punakaiki, a very small town on the ocean. The beaches were great to look at, but not to hang out on. The ocean is pretty wild there so there are cool rock formations and overhanging cliffs in the water and on the beaches. The beach itslef was made of tons of tiny rocks - smaller than gravel, but much bigger than sand - that were painful to walk on and there were tons of sandflies so not moving around meant the itching which I'm still feeling right now. We had a fun night of hanging out with a German guy, a Spanish guy and girl (all about my age), and an Australian couple (about 28). The next day we went to the "famous" Punekaiki Pancake rocks which were lots of rock towers with many layers on them making them look something like stacked pancakes. There was a great area here with a few blowholes - one of which shot water about 300 feet into the air. On our way out of town we walked up a river to a cave which was a lot of fun. We probably made it about 500 feet into the cave before reaching a narrow crawl space with a mud floor which we didn't want to work our way through. There were some man-placed bricks in the very muddy areas, but for the most part we were climbing through the perfectly natural cave with nothing but our own flashlights to guide us. It was a very impressive experience.

We went to the Nelson Lakes National Park - which really wasn't very spectacular. A very small town with a pretty crappy hostel. One great thing - the only place to eat in the area was the somewhat expensive bar of the hotel that our hostel was connected to and I ordered a lamb-shank (the first of New Zealand's sheep that I ate) and the woman thought I looked hungry so she gave me 2 for the price of 1 - quite good and very filling). We did a short (less than 2 hours) walk the next morning before heading on our way - pretty lake but nothing exciting compared to the rest of the South Island.

On the way up from there, we headed a little out of our way to the city of Nelson to do some camera shopping and I got a new camera. Found the best sale in NZ, but still a good deal more expensive than in the US. So you all get some pictures again.

With a new camera in hand we came next to an area called the Golden Bay. It is a very large bay at the top of the South Island with many nice beaches along it and the Abel Tasman National Park just next door. Our first evening was spent exploring the nearby beach, the only decent sized town nearby, and talking to a couple of Englishmen (one about 25 and one about 60 though we don't know their exact relationship) that were sharing our hostel. The younger guy is on his 15th month away from home on an around-the-world trip which will be almost 2 years total and he spent 3 months in Thailand and 1 month in Cambodia so we got some good information from him. The older guy was obsessed with music and was into bands like Bright Eyes, Muse, and Trail of the Dead - but mainly The Beatles. They were very friendly and very funny so spending time with them was definitely relaxed fun more than interesting as is often the case with other travelers.

Yesterday was our first whole day in this area and we spent it hiking the Abel Tasman Great Walk (after Milford Sounds it's a lot of people's favorite in NZ). We put together a nice loop instead of going out then back again as is usually the only option on Great Walks (remember those are the multiple day tracks with sleeping huts along them). Doing this loop however, meant going up and over a large hill before coming back down to the ocean on the other side and following the coastline back. This caused much tiredness within the first 2 hours of what turned out to be about 7 hours of hiking (with a couple 10 minute breaks). But after we got down the other, steeper side of the hill we were to what we thought might be flat land (we were wrong). The rest of the track involved walking along a beach for a little ways and then getting back on a trail to climb up a hill then back down the other side to the next beach. This repeated many times before the end. It was a very pretty hike though and the beaches were some of the only "real beaches" (soft sand, not many large rocks sticking out of the water) we've seen so far and most beaches we had all to ourselves which was nice even though we didn't really stop much and it was too cold to swim. At the top of the hills I was always hot enough to swim, but the walk down the hills was usually in the shade and that gave the sweat a chance to start to dry and cool off and coming out into the wind on the beaches made swimming sound not-so-fun. We covered a lot of ground, much of which was up-and-down, some of which was sand, and although we were exhausted, we weren't in as much pain as some of the other comparable hikes (swapping from boots to sandals partway through probably helped the pain in the bottom of my feet which usually is pretty bad after 4 or 5 hours). Then it was back to the hostel for showers and lounging around with the English again.

Today has been more relaxing. We drove up to the very tip of the island, stopping at Rosy Glow's Chocolate Cottage for some homemade chocolate. We stopped at a spring which was the largest fresh-water spring in Australasia and the clearest in the world. It pumped out 14,000 liters of water per second, or 457 million gallons per day. At the tip of the island did a short walk out to one of the beaches where the wind was very strong (not quite as strong as the last windy beach we went to though), looked around, then came back down the coast for some time to read and catch up on our internet usage (we are in some guy's house who only charges $4/hour - a little weird but cheaper than anywhere else. Windows Vista too (omg overpriced). Alright, let's see if some pictures can come with this.

Travelblog stopped responding when I wrote this and then the internet got too slow to add pictures or publish this yesterday, so you get another description of "yesterday" and "today." Yesterday we did a short walk to a waterfall before leaving the Golden Bay area and heading over to the city of Nelson. Not too much going on in Nelson, our hostel is pretty cool but overrun with Germans and there is very little English to be heard. Today we walked around the city (it's pretty small compared to the other cities we've been in). We hiked up a hill and got to the geographical center of New Zealand, not too exciting but there were some nice views from the hill at least. We walked through a Japanese garden and another garden area, neither of which were very impressive. Saw a couple art galleries and a glass blowing gallery and studio which was pretty cool, we saw a glass paua(abolone) shell being made. Then we went to our first movie since we've been away. They have a computer at the sales window with all the seats on it and you get your choice of which seats are still available and then you have those seats reserved for the movie (kinda cool, but it confused half the audience who were not from NZ). We saw Beowulf which was very visually impressive - definately a theater movie. It was very entertaining but hard to get into too much, it felt like a very long, very high quality video game cinematic. Well, there's a line for this computer now so I'm just going to try to post some pictures and get this thing published finally. Seeya.

Well, pictures aren't working so I'm just gonna publish text for now.

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Comments

[pmertens]

My best guess would be 30