Nelson to Wanaka

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March 12 Greymouth

Last night was the big earthquake in Japan and New Zealand was under tsunami alert. We took a look at the map and Nelson, which is a coastal city, was potentially in its path. Kind of eerie, especially since there was no information from anyone as to what was happening, or what to do in case of. We followed things on the news, and decided on a plan of action for ourselves, should anything happen. We then went to bed, woke up around 4am and checked the news again. All was well. Guess a wave of a about a foot hit the northern beach where we had done the beach bus trip.

Our trip to Greymouth was a long day, hitting the road at 8am. It was uneventful until we stopped for a break at Murchinson, a very small town. When it was time to get back on board the bus, we went no where. Apparently the transmission was shot so we had to sit around for 3 hours waiting for another bus. Did wander the town for a bit and then sat in the shade and read our books. From there we continued to the ‘Wild West Coast’ of NZ. This is a very sparsely populated part of the country, about 23000 people along the whole coast. It is a limestone coast with some amazing land formations that we stopped to take a look at. First stop was at Cape Foulwind, so named by Capt Cook because his ship was blown off course here. Then we head through Paparoa National Park and stopped to see the Pancake Rocks. The pictures best describe these interesting rock formations. Other than that, the rest of the day was uneventful, with us finally arriving in Greymouth around 7pm. Our hostel wasn’t great, but it was only for one night. And dinner was even worse; the town shuts down early and our dinner choice was MacDonalds or KFC. We chose the latter and then hit the sack early.

March 13 Franz Joseph,

This is a very cute tourist town with a population of about 300 people. It takes all of fifteen minutes walk from on end of town and back again. There is a large glacier about 5 km from town which is why the bus overnights here. We didn’t do any glacier activities - we came all this way to get away from the ice and snow so were not prepared to pay more $$ to go play on it. We did a couple of ‘bush’ walks around the area, went for a delicious dinner, and wandered the tourist shops. If time had permitted, we could easily have spent more time here hiking the many trails.

On the way here today we made a short stop at the gold mining town of Ross and checked out some of the historical buildings and such. This place is apparently sitting on another 700 million dollars of gold so may well become a boom town once more. Other than that, it was a scenic drive through the Westland National Park and on to Franz Joseph.

March 14, Wanaka

Another early start with the bus leaving at 7:45am. It has been a long travel day but the area is beautiful. We continued along the coast line for a couple of hours, pacing by the Fox Glacier (which we couldn’t see because of clouds) and stopped to walk into Lake Matheson. Because of the cloudy weather, we didn’t get the famous mountain reflections, but it made for some nice pictures anyways. We then turned inland and traveled through the mountains of the Central Otago region. Again, because it was overcast today, so we did not get to see the full mountain views, but nice anyways. The park areas we traveled through are easily comparable to the National parks in BC and Alberta. The area closer to Wanaka is farm land again and reminded us a bit of the mountain areas of Scotland.

Wanaka is a small city of about 5000 people and is another tourist area. We plan to stay here for three nights and do some hiking, weather permitting. I also discovered that in our haste to get going this morning I left my sunglasses and phone sitting on the window ledge in the Franz Joseph YHA hostel. The YHA hostel we are staying in here in Wanaka phoned Franz Joseph for me and they have offered to put them on Wednesday’s Magic Bus. Sure hope the stuff catches up with me.

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Photos

Darrel in the stocks
At small gold mining town of Ross

Keri Bird
A relative of the Kiwi

L. Matheson
Better know as the Mirror Lake