It was an early departure from Nelson.
Like, 7am or something similar?
Naturally, I woke up super-early, so I had time to kill, as I walked through rain which wasn’t quite bad enough to warrant pausing under a tree to get my raincoat out.
That rain did cause some trouble later on, when the wipers on one side of the bus stopped working. Naturally, it was the driver’s side.
I didn’t much like the look of the weather when we got to a stop at Punakaiki/Pancake Rocks, so elected not to take a wander down the path in order to look at said rocks.
This turned out to be a good plan, as it absolutely pissed down a few minutes after we got there, at the level where you had to raise your voice to be heard, and even the folks running the cafe were making the “Fuuuuuck” expression as they closed the doors into the more exposed ‘terrace’ section.
Tried to get a picture or two of the rain, but they were a bit crap, so here’s some mist being all portentous. Or something.
The hostel had offered a pickup from the train station, which is also the bus station, and it made the whole process much … What’s the word? … Drier.
Lunch happened at the Monteith’s Brewery down the road, on the grounds that it was close, warm, and … no, that’s it.
The hostel room, of which this is the only picture I took, was very nice.
Had a ranchslider onto a wee deck, so that I could look at the rain, an actual radiator heater (I’m told that the dorm-style rooms, or at least one of them, didn’t have those. Then again, my room was at the far end of the building, and one of the walls looked to be the outside cinderblock wall of the building, so maybe it needed it?), and a big warm blanket, which came in handy on the colder days.
Met the first actual New Zealanders of the trip; Adrian, who was just generally traveling, and Dora, who was doing nurse intern things in Greymouth.
There’s not too much to say about Greymouth, or at least my Greymouth experience.
It rained a lot, there are some walking/cycling paths that are nice if you like ambling along the top of flood defense structures, though you’d want to be confident about the weather, there’s a lot of remnants of the city’s time as a coal exporting port, and the beach here doesn’t look like one of those forgiving ones.
A couple showed up on Saturday who’d come for the surf, then taken a look at things and thought “Bugger That”.
So, what did I do?
Hung out in a pretty sociable hostel, with interesting folks from all over the place;
- Dimitri from Switzerland
- Adrian from Tauranga
- Fran from Yorkshire
- Claus from Bavaria, who wasn’t actually staying there, but came by in the evenings to use the internet, and maybe shower?
Went to see X-Men: Apocalypse with Dimitri & Adrian. Film was good, walk back was bloody cold, with creepy mist-drifts, and still, nobody can make Cyclops into an interesting character.
On the last night, went to a nearby pub to use up some free drink vouchers & completely fail to see a motorbike race I’ve forgotten the name of that Dimitri wanted to see, because it was on a different Sky TV channel the bar didn’t have. Or something.
Also in the group, along with Dimitri & Adrian & Fran, was Harry from a slightly different part of Yorkshire, who was in the process of seeing all of NZ. In a couple of weeks. Before selling his car and leaving.
There was not a lot of wiggle room in his schedule, but he did have some extra beer which had been sloshing around in his car, which lead to a somewhat late night, but a good one.
Somewhere during the stay here I’d booked the train trip to Christchurch, with a couple of nights in Arthur’s Pass, and fortunately noticed the “There Are No Shops Here” warning from the YHA, so I planned accordingly, with food from the canned and probably won’t squish, and is still edible if it does departments.
On a related note, my pack feels like it’s getting heavier and bigger.
The hostel-provided list to the train station was useful, and the train was, of course, late.
No big deal; It’s not like I had any tight travel connections to make.
I was trying to get a picture of the clouds streaming back off the hills, and I’m pretty happy with this one.
Various pieces of Greymouth’s port heritage.
Bloody Great Breakwater, intended to keep the river clear and navigable. Apparently it still works.
Also, there was a seal.
Or maybe a sea lion?
In any case, it had climbed ab impressive way up from the water for a critter with no legs.
And the sheltered bit of the river, as it flows through town.
It should probably be mentioned that the flood defense wall fairly looms over the street below. I had breakfast in what I was told was the best cafe in Greymouth (By a Japanese chap from Tokyo who also worked at the hostel, and whose name started with a Y-sound. I am not good at names), and all you could see out the front of said cafe was the road & the river-wall.
Said cafe was named “DP1”, and seemed to be an all-dreadlocked establishment.
No idea why it’s called DP1, though I’m wondering whether it’s a reference to cadastral boundaries.
