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Published: March 2nd 2011
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Well Greymouth was pretty uneventful. The wind and the rain in the night were borederline torrential, and I woke up with a bit of a cold. Ran over to Countdown (supermarket) to get some lemsip and some vitamins, hopefully they will sort me out.
Magic bus driver today is a guy called Vale. He explained how his house in Christchruch has been flattened and at the moment he is homeless and is just driving as much as he can. This guy was about as happy as a person could be and he was beaming all the time. I tried to understand how someone can be like this when they have no house to go back to. He explained to me later on that they only thing that is important to him is his friends and family and that was all that matters. It just puts a lot of things in perspective for me, when I worry about stuff when really there are much bigger things going on in the world and this kind of spirit highlights this to me and how I must just go with the flow and not concern myself with material things.
We followed the road
all the way along the coast. We stopped for some scramble eggs at Hokitika, or Hoki for short and witnessed some ridiculous waves there. Vale told us that it's really unsafe to swim in these waters - "If the rip tide doesn't get you then the sharks will!" - fair enough, I'll give that one a skip.
We also stopped off at a place called Ross. This town was beyond sleepy and Vale explained that they get a few buses in a day and that's what keeps the visitor centre open. This place had some interesting bits and pieces, including some oddly named shower gels - Willy Wash for blokes and short and curly for women ! The rest fo the place was centred around the gold mining industry thatused to thrive here. For $7 you could pan for gold, but the phrase "I saw you coming" came to mind and I gave that a skip.
We are slowly getting to know people on the bus a bit more now. A couple called James and Anna from up north who have just finsihed university and travelled quite extensively for a few months, a woman called Becky and another
guy called Danny who is a bit of a laugh and who I am getting on really well with.
We then stopped off at the Bushman's centre to meet in the infamous Pete the Bushman. This dude, apparently according to Vale, is the stereotypical image of people on the West Coast of the South Island. Erm, what can I say, this bloke is one of the most excentric people I have ever met. He explained how we were about to wacth a film in his museum - a homage to basically capturing deer (I'll get into that a bit more in a minute) - the film was called "Why Bambi was a Terrorist". Yeah this dude was a character alright !
Basically Pete the Bushman was part of a pioneering group of people back in the 1960s who helped develop a techinque to catch deer and then get them rehoused into farms so that they could be used for there meat - venison and there velvet - antlers. At the time this technique had never been used before and soon it was used in the States to round up and relocate bison. Maybe something that you had to
see for yourself, but it was a pretty "out there" place and the video was pretty hillarious.
On the road agai and we started seeing signs saying "No to 1080". Vale explained to us that this is a poison used to try and get rid of possums. Possums were introduced a while back in New Zealand, and every night they eat up to 98 million tonnes fo vegetation and are therefore classed as a pest. 1080 is a pellet which is used to try and combat the numbers of these little critters, but unfortunately it also gets into the river and other animals eat it. New Zealand is apprently trying to develop a poison that can onyl effect possums but it is proving pretty difficult. It's called gel bait and it sticks to the trees and as possums only climb trees this is supposed to work. I think the jury is out on that one too.
Once we got to Franz Josef, the weather was changing it's mind every 5 minutes and the sky dive that we wanted to do was on eand off more times than a kettle at breakfast time. So we succumb to the fact
that we wouldn't be doing it and we opted for the glacie hot pools and some quad biking too. The hot pools were great, three pools of heated glacier water with 36, 38 and 40 degrees on offer. The 40 was pretty hot, so we kept out of that one pretty much. After this we headedback via the quad bike shop, checked out the prices then rang the sky dive people to tripley make sure we weren't going and then headed out with Mark on the bikes.
The quad biking was great fun, as some of you may know I have done a bit of quad biking before and Toby used to own one so we were in our element. Mark the instructor loved it as well as he could take the bikes places he hadn't been before. He explained to us how he was doing a charity quad bike trip with a mate in South America, it has been featured on Captial radio back in London. Toby and I were laughing when he got stuck in the mud twice (it was pretty boggy) and we had to pull him out. Good luck in South America mate !! Hahaha.
We went out int he evening for some drinks after confirming our 18,000 foot sky dive for the next morning. So the next blog update should be pretty sweet 😊
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