52c. Tiki Tour - Part Three

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In March, we headed off on a 2-week holiday of NZ’s South Island. We used a 'hop on hop off' bus service called Stray Backpacker Bus NZ to get around, and our big highlights were swimming with dolphins, catching our own fish for dinner and climbing a glacier.

Stops 4 to 6 : West Coast of the South Island;
Brewery and glacier, nature and nurture

(N) The west coast of New Zealand is known for its raw natural beauty: towering mountains, rugged rainforests, magnificent glaciers and beautiful beaches. It is not densely populated: 27,000 people live in Blenheim town, but only 30,000 along the entire 1000km west coast!

Before we left Abel Tasman National Park we went for a morning walk, looked out to sea for a while and saw geese flying overhead. Driving through the countryside always has something interesting to see, in this part of the country we went past a walnut farm, and saw hops growing (90%!o(MISSING)f which are exported to Ireland!). We had a scone break in the town of Murchison, which is an unusual place as it has banned smoking everywhere in the village. Just a limited number of local residents have bought smoking permits(!) but anyone else smoking can get a large fine. You have to walk to the town boundary to light up (but it's not far).

We travelled on through the rugged Buller Gorge in the Kahurangi National Park, full of ferns, plants and clouds, and came to the most photographed piece of tarmac in NZ, called Hawk's Crag, which is literally an overhang that was hand-hacked out of the mountainside so that traffic can pass through (see photo).

In the old days, before the roads were built, it used to take 17 days to get to the coast, but now it's just 2 hours. We went for a walk at Cape Foulwind, so named by Captain Cook because the weather was bad when he passed by, but it was blue skies when we arrived, and must have been fine for the Maoris too, because they called it 'Sheltered Anchorage'. It was a 4km walk, past lots of flax plants, with superb views out to sea from the granite bluffs, watching (and hearing) the strong waves crash on the rocks below. One rock was circular and looked like a giant cake. At the other end of the trail was a New Zealand fur seal (kekeno) colony - these animals were hunted to within a whisker of disappearance, and breeding only occurred on the North Island in 1995 for the first time in centuries.

Before the day was out, we stopped at Punakaiki Pancake Rocks, they get the ‘pancake’ name because the rocks are stacked up like piles of, well, crêpes. Made of marine organism limestone fragments, and about 35 million years old (but who’s counting?), scientists aren't exactly sure how this stylo-bedding occurred, but it did look odd and impressive at the same time, especially when the waves forced water up through some blow-holes with a big wooshing noise.

We stayed that night in a tiny place called Barrytown (pop. 225), which used to be a much bigger place in the heyday of gold-prospecting. On arrival, we walked the kilometre or so to the beach, it was such a spectacular location with the huge mountains towering over, the pebbly beach itself was pretty wild with crashing waves. I was looking forward to this night because we were staying in an old goldminers’ pub called 'The All Nations', and was expecting a quiet night by the fireplace with some good ale; but actually it was a Stray Travel-organised party night and although it wasn’t quiet, the beer was good...

The following morning I was desperate to make a trip to Monteith's, a brewery dating back to 1868. It is my favourite NZ beer (it won 'World's Best lager 2007' in London), and I had already booked us on a tour a week ago. The only problem was transport: the brewery was 20km away, in the town of Greymouth, but there were no buses or even taxis, so we had to hitch. I carefully wrote 'Greymouth' with a big marker pen on the side of a cardboard box and we waited, but nobody was stopping. I then gave Paula the sign to hold and the next campervan stopped straightaway, driven by a kind couple from the UK, and they decided to come on the tour as well.

I won't bore you with too many brewery details (although I'd like to): suffice to say that production is small, with only 7 full-time workers, and that as well as tasting the 7 varieties on tap in the bar, we also tried the different malted barley ingredients that they used (including one chocolate-type imported from the UK) which, as my sister would say, tasted very much like cereal. They use 'open vat fermentation' which means that we could see hundreds of litres of beer sitting in each steel vat, and get wafts as we walked past. The beer matures for a minimum of 30 days in the 'bright beer' cellar (bright beer is beer that has been filtered but not bottled). Last interesting point (- for boys! - P): the urinals were made of beer barrels.

The rest of the day was made up of a long-ish drive through scenery as spectacular as before. We made a stop in the village of Pukekura at The Bushman Centre, run by a small team with a very offbeat sense of humour. As well as keeping a wild boar and a wallaby (like a mini kangaroo) in their garden, there were displays inside on how the possum - introduced from Australia and considered a pest - is eating away the NZ countryside and native animals - and as such they sell possum pie! One of the guys who runs it used to be a deer hunter and there was a video showing how it used to be done: these dudes used to ride into the mountains in a helicopter and then jump out onto the deer's back (literally). The deer were then winched out and sold to the new deer farms. It was really successful, now there are lots of deer farms in NZ and guys don't jump out of helicopters anymore. But deer are still considered a pest and although their numbers were reduced during the farming days, they have built up again in recent years.

Later on we arrived at the town of Franz Josef Glacier, a climb up which we did the following morning. Just to be clear, we learnt that a glacier is a large body of ice that forms on land and moves slowly downhill. It is fed by snow accumulating in high altitude basins, where it condenses to form blue ice. The ice flows downhill under its own weight, cracking open in parts as it moves, forming a jumble of deep crevasses.

On arrival at the Alpine Centre in the morning, we were given all the necessary kit: hat, gloves, socks, waterproof boots (still wet inside from yesterday, yuck!) as well as trousers and Gore-Tex jacket, plus a bum-bag containing crampons. After a short bus ride, we arrived at a shallow rocky river bed, at the end of which was the glacier itself. Our guide informed us that the glacier used to extend much further than it does currently, and this fact could be seen on the mountainside - there were trees only down as far as the level where the glacier had been, and the remaining area was now covered in much younger bush. We walked the 2km over the rocky riverbed to get to the base of the glacier, and put on our spiky crampons (which were strapped to our boots), and felt just like Edmund Hillary. A great piece of advice was to be careful where you put your feet, you wouldn't want to accidentally stand on your other foot...

Looking closely at the ice, it was possible to see bubbles extending within the glacier. I touched it and can confirm that the surface was indeed very cold and very hard, in fact it was a lot like walking around on a giant ice cube. Every step made a scrunching noise (as it would), and we followed our guide left and right, up slopes and also up a short flight of steps that he hacked with his pick-axe as we went along. The most interesting walking was when we squeezed along a couple of small corridors in between 2 large sides of ice.

Sometimes the glacier's colour was just plain white, other times the black rock pierced the surface in swathes, making it look dirty just by its darkness - but the most spectacular hue was the blue - this was where the ice is more dense, and the blue colour is caused by the light not being absorbed by the ice (I think).

The glacier is always moving, at the moment it is retreating up the mountain, around the speed of your fingernails, but those parts of it in steeper places are naturally moving quicker. Its depth is between 30m to 150m depending on the location.

By the end of the day, we had walked around 12km in total, and from about 250m to about 600m above-sea-level. From our highest position we could see up to around 1,100m but the actual summit of the glacier is at 2,200m which can only be reached by helicopter - maybe next time?!

The following day we really felt like we were in a rainforest, the skies were completely grey and the rain was heavy for the day. There had been a funny sign in The Bushman Centre, above, obviously because too many people had complained about the weather. "Why is there so much rain?" it began.

"Because you are in a rainforest. We don't know what the weather will be like tomorrow, we're working. You're the ones on holiday and have the time to read the newspaper"!

There is an average annual rainfall of 4.7 METRES at the Glacier on the west coast. To put that into perspective, there is only 0.65 metres in Christchurch on the same latitude on the east coast. The official reason for all the rain is that the moist air coming over from Australia is too heavy to pass over the mountains, so it falls.

So yes, heavy rainfall greeted us the following morning. Nevertheless we still went to Lake Matheson which is one of the most beautiful lakes in NZ, on a clear day you can see towering peaks reflected in its perfect mirror-like surface and they say that, if you took a photo and turned it upside down, you would not know which was the actual mountain and which was the reflection. This was not the case today, with a rippled lake surface and loads of rain and grey clouds - it was the definition of good weather for ducks.

We stopped for the day just down the road from Franz Josef Town in Fox Glacier Town, another village named after the huge glacier on its doorstep. We had a great hostel that had a DVD player in our room, ideal for the weather! But we still wanted to see the glacier, so waited for a while till there was a pause in the rain, and began the 6km walk to the viewpoint. However, as it was a rainforest (see above), the heavens opened up shortly after and we began to get very wet, so started to hitch-hike. Fortunately it was not too long till we got picked up by another kind British couple. It was howling a gale when we got to the glacier, and all the walking tracks were closed due to rockfalls. However we saw the glacier in the medium distance, looking as impressive as Franz Josef, but what it really looked like was this: a huge wide roaring river that had been simply frozen in its tracks.

Sunshine the next morning! We went back to the same places as yesterday but the mostly clear blue skies meant that it was like a new place. At Lake Matheson, we could see the reflection of the Southern Alps in the water, as the early morning mist was burning off and ducks were flying overhead. We also went back to Fox Glacier, and could see its beginnings further up into the mountains. Further down the road, a couple of HUGE boulders had fallen onto the road which blocked passage. It was obviously not the first time as there was a special little lane built around it for when this occurred.

The day was sunny from start to finish, which made it worth stopping a couple of times to walk into the rainforest to see waterfalls, and also Ship Creek, a sandy beach with furious waves and lots of dead logs, which got its name from a boat that started from Liverpool and was wrecked off the Aussie coast, whose hull made it all the way over to this part of the NZ coast. The pingao (grass found in sand dunes) on this beach in Maori legend comes from a god's eyebrows.

On this day we also passed NZ's newest lake, appropriately called Young Lake! It was openly formed about a year ago, when massive boulders fell down a mountainside and made something of a dam from a river. Amazing.

*****

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Photos

Hawk's Crag
The water level came up to the overhang height during the area's worst flooding

All Nations Pub, Barrytown
This former goldminers' town is now a small village, and this old pub at the mountain foot is the social centre

Ummm, the waft of raw beer
Monteith's Brewery, Greymouth

Monteith's Brewery Bar, Greymouth
The samples at the end of the tour

Ship Creek, West Coast, South Island
Spot Paula, bottom left

Penguin Crossing
South Island