Fowl Fox and funky penguin
It was to be another early morning up at 7am so we could be out by 8:30 having planned for lay in bed time which dident happen we were ready by 8am and heading for Fox Guides. When we turned up at 8:50 all kitted up ready to go dispite the rain we got told our helihike was cancelled due to the weather. 🙁 This was very dissapointing, apart from actually coming to NZ one of the main things I was looking to do here was to walk on one of the two glaciers. Still I will be back and next time ill be up there, as ill have more time to get the perfect weather.
So from here we decided to hit the road and clock up some miles or km over here, heading up the west coast in the rain was not all that fun but we soon were near Hokitika a good distance from Fox along with some dryer weather. We stopped of here as its the closest town to where most of NZ jade is mined. This area is big on mining and was a big gold mining area in the past. After a couple of milkshakes and carrot cake we decided that there was ot a lot to see here and took a quick stroll along the beach before jumping back in the van to head on to Greymouth. On the way to Greymouth from Hokitika we came across the only road rail bridge in NZ that is both, yep you have to use the same single lane bridge with traffic from the other side and dodge the trains as well, see the pics.
We were hoping at Greymouth to top up our User Road License with another 2000km as we only had around 200km left on our current one. When we arrived at Greymouth we discovered that most places were shut on a Saturday afternoon, we got there about 1pm, bummer. Postshop and Vehicle Inspection New Zealand were both closed and we couldn’t top up online as we don’t have a NZ license. This Postshop wouldn’t be open till Monday by which time we would be in Nelson around 350km away ummm!
Off to New World for some shopping and Dominos for very late lunch we then headed on toward Westport as we had found a place to stay for the night nearby.
On our way we had planned to stop at the pancake rocks and blow holes. Before we got there we came across the coolest road sign in the whole world! Yep its Warning penguins for the next 1km well this definably required a picture! The blow holes were not blowing as the tide was out at the time, but we did see all the pancake rocks.
From here we headed on to where we were staying the night, it was a Low Cost Parking, offering washing machine, internet, power and bar. We arrived 10km from anywhere and found that it was a tavern and a locals place, we walked in and felt very out of place, we had a beer and then parked around the back by the stage were we hand to plug into the long extension cable running to the stage. It then took an age to get the wireless code out of them but in the end we were in the van and happy. We also finally had our xmas pudding
