South Island Trip - Day 5 - Christchurch to Greymouth

the Southern Alps

When we turned on the laptop this evening to download the photos we'd taken today, we discovered we were in range of an unsecured wireless network. So we've taken a cheeky piggyback to make this post!

We're now five days behind in our trip report, but I'm going to post just one day at a time rather than trying to catch up all at once.

On day 5 of our South Island trip we drove right across the country from Christchurch on the east coast to Greymouth on the west. We really must put together a map showing our route, and add it to our posts, but I think that's a job that's best left until we get home.

It was day 5 that we got our first glimpse of the Southern Alps, the mountain range that runs almost the whole length of the South Island. We took the road that goes over Arthur's Pass. There's an interesting history behind the pass, which you can read here.

Part of the way down the west side of the Alps we stopped to take some photographs, and our car was attacked by a cheeky kea, or alpine parrot. It made two holes in the cover of our spare tyre and had started work on the piece of rubber securing our back window before Iain managed to chase it off. I think 'flying monkeys' would be a better description for these birds!

Who's a cheeky boy, then?

On the road to Greymouth we went past the old Brunner coal mine, the site of New Zealand’s biggest ever mining disaster, in 1896, in which 65 people died. There's an interesting account of events here.

After we'd checked into the hotel at Greymouth we took a short drive up the coast to see the pancake rocks and blowholes at Punakaiki. Here's a description from the official Punakaiki website:

The Pancake Rocks that Punakaiki is famous for, are limestone formations that began forming 30 million years ago, when lime-rich fragments of dead marine creatures were deposited on the seabed, then overlaid by weaker layers of soft mud and clay.

The seabed was raised above sealevel by earthquakes to form the coastal cliffs and coastline. The sea, wind and rain have since etched out the soft layers to form the unusual rock formations we see today.

When conditions are right, heavy ocean swells thunder into the caverns beneath the rocks and huge water spouts blast skywards through the blowholes in a truly spectacular sight.

some of the 'pancake rocks' at Punakaiki

the beautiful West Coast - we thought this bit looked more like the Caribbean than New Zealand!

Greymouth seemed a bit of a dump, to be perfectly frank. When we arrived it was New Year’s Eve and everywhere was shut - including most of the pubs and all of the restaurants. The streets were deserted apart from the occasional small group of bewildered tourists, looking in desperation for somewhere that was open where they could spend the evening. Eventually we found a cafe that was open, and despite the seedy decor, the food wasn't bad, and the waitress pointed us in the direction of the place where the party was - an Irish bar. In distinctly un-Irish fashion we left before midnight, making a New Year's resolution not to bother coming back to Greymouth again.

Helen