Monday 12 March 2007

The West Coast


Our first stop for the night is just outside Westport, where we find a beach to park up at and make our home before heading on the next day. This will become the routine for most of our journey. Reach somewhere, park out of town to sleep and then head in or on the next morning. The one thing we didn't manage to fit in the car was a shower but as this is a nation of camp sites, we've not done too bad, sneaking in and out of parks 'testing' their facilities, including at our most audacious, sneaking in in the evening for a shower and leaving our ice blocks in the freezer and sneaking back in in the morning to collect our frozen blocks for the cooler bin and washing our dishes.

The journey continues and driving through Blenheim, we find ourselves in one of NZ's major wine producing regions. As such, we dutifully pop in to a winery to sip a glass and try our best to conjure images of woodland walks with hints of elderberries and faint whiffs of such and such. As irony would have it, we picked the one winery that exports all it's produce to the UK, and keeps very little for it's domestic market. So if you pop into Sainsbury's have a look for the Grove Mill label, we've been to check it out and it was very nice too.

Stopping in at Greymouth for the afternoon, we dole on up to the town's top10 holiday park for our showers before finding somewhere to stay. Looking in to the back of our car to get our stuff we suddenly realise that disaster has struck. The chilly bin, full of bags of ice cubes to keep our food (and grove mill wine) cool, has broken free from it's seat belt which keeps it up right, sitting on top of our bed and it has tipped over, pouring water all over our bed. We park up right at the beach and entrance to the camp site and hang our bedsheets over the fence and stand our mattress up against the car to dry them all in the afternoon sun. Eventually successful, we had a dry bed again but also a beach full of people who thought we had had a 'little accident'. A few of the passing children gave us understanding glances.

During these days we saw quite a few things too. We saw a seal colony at Cape Fowlwind, pancake rocks at Punakaiki which is a big rock structure that has formed like lots and lots of pancakes stacked on top of each other, and the lesser spotted Kiwi, albeit in captivity - A dangerous beastie right enough, that when it smelled us through a gap in the glass started trying to break through it to get to us, but don't worry, it didn't manage it.

Then by day 4 we were to be passing a rather well named town that seemed worthy of a visit if just for a photo by the sign, Ross! We stopped for an hour and ended up staying for two days.

1 comment:

Sarah said...

Dude that's cool.
Wish you had photos of your bed sheet clothesline.