Westland, Part 2

After finishing our TranzAlpine journey, we picked up with our tour down the West Coast. As I’m sure you’ll remember, our West Coast story had left off with Stop #4, Greymouth in the rain, after which we headed on a detour East and into the sunshine and came back to find the West Coast just as rainy as we’d left it.

Stop #5 – Hokitika. We made a quick stop for gas and lunch in Hokitika Town Centre, a cute little town with a big focus on its status as the greenstone (jade) capital of New Zealand. We stopped in a jade gallery to look around, checked out a glassblowing studio and visited the Hokitika Sock World, which claimed to be the world’s greatest sock store (spoiler alert: it was not). Then, hoping that the rain was clearing, we drove out to Hokitika Gorge. We had been over-optimistic about the weather, but we were excited to see the gorge, so we geared up in our raincoats and rain pants and set off on the pleasant jungle walk. One awesome outcome of the rain was that there were very few people at the Gorge, giving us an almost solitary experience. And the gorge was SO BEAUTIFUL! It sweeps through lovely rock walls and was moving quite quickly while we were there, but surprisingly serenely and gradually with no rocks to break it into rapids. The water carries glacial flour, which we learned is fine rock dust created by glaciers grinding against the mountain, and it turns the water an incredible blue-green.

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Stop #6 – Franz Josef Glacier. We stayed the night in a very nice Backpackers Lodge in Franz Josef, planning to do a hike on the glacier the following day. Unfortunately, when we arrived at the guide company in the morning, they told us that all tours had been canceled due to the weather (extreme rain was forecast – apparently the downpours we had been experiencing weren’t anything remarkable; the area gets 7 meters of rain each year). So we went to see kiwi birds! Franz Josef houses the West Coast Wild Life Centre, which has a kiwi house where we got to see an 11-month-old kiwi and three 3-month-old kiwis. They’re a remarkably mammal-like bird, and looked like they should be very cuddly. But since they are nocturnal, we saw them in a dark room with red light and no photos were allowed, so check out these ones.

Stop #7 – Highway 6 from Haast towards Otago. Ok, so this one wasn’t really a stop, or at least, it wasn’t one stop. It was SO MANY stops at ALL THE WATERFALLS. The drive from Haast to Wanaka is supposed to take about 2 hours, but there are a lot of waterfalls close to the road that you can quickly walk to, and since waterfalls are one of those sights that may actually be better in the rain, we decided we’d give Wyatt an easy time of it and stop pretty much every kilometer ;) At one point, we were stopping so frequently that we weren’t even sure we’d make it to Wanaka by dark – the drive ended up taking us about 5 hours. Here are shots of some of the waterfalls:

We may make it back to the West Coast if we can find some time when there is good weather and room in our schedule!