New Zealand - February 18 - The Western Highway

Get your motor running
Head out on the highway....

Thursday the 18th was a big driving day. We were taking on The Western Highway - dubbed by Lonely Planet as one of the planet's best road trips!!! Probably pretty high up in the universe, as well.

From New Zealand

First, we had to get to Westport from our mountain cabinesque sleeping spot at the Hu Ha Bikepackers. (They let us stay even though we had no bikes to pack.) And, you can't just drive drive drive, particularly when you are passing New Zealand's LONGEST SWING BRIDGE! So, we bridged then walked their little loop through the NZ rainforest - but we did not take the flying fox back. While everything was wet, wet, wet there was reason to hope that the sun might be coming out soon.

From New Zealand

You can always hope.

So the stunning scenery begins at Westport. Here, let me show you what we saw at our first look out.

From New Zealand

Amazing!

Perhaps if it were not raining so hard, it would have been more obvious that after you park your car near the picnic table you need to cross the highway at the hairpin curve to climb up to where the real lookout awaits.

From New Zealand

It continued to rain. Our stops to chase our breath were few.

From New Zealand

Eventually we came to Punakaiki National Park - the home of the Pancake Rocks. First, however, we needed to make arrangements for lodging overnight and register for climbing the glacier the next day. (Being on vacation we weren't really thinking that "tomorrow is Friday" and that weekends might be challenging for finding economical lodging near major attractions. These activities took longer than they sound. Oh, and we ate lunch!)

From New Zealand

Pancake Rocks: The waves crashing onto the shore were fabulous. This time I remembered the continuous function on my camera and so I have whole series of photos of waves approaching, cresting, exploding, receding. The down side? My camera got pretty wet and the view finder has never had the same clarity since. (It is still usable. This is not a tragic story.)

From New Zealand

Kevin identified an old ghost town so we detoured inland. Waiuta was a gold mining town - established in the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1951 the mine collapsed and since this was the source of employment for the entire community, they all left town. As we drove eastward the day brightened and there was no significant threat of rain remaining as we completed the 7 km dirt road leading into town. As you might expect, there are mostly building skeletons (foundations, chimneys). What you wouldn't guess unless maybe you knew something about gold mining was that there were signs posted everywhere describing what a toxic mess the ground was. By the time we'd seen the town and driven on to find the processing plant, the dark clouds had found us.

From New Zealand

And, then, we drove back to the coast. We were too late for both the National Kiwi Centre and the Hokitika Sock Machine Museum (oh no!). And, while we did stop at the Glow Worm Dell just outside of Hokitika - it is hard to appreciate a glow worm in the daylight! Most disappointing - we could not get to Okarito in time for the Kiwi safari (boasting a 90% success rate in finding kiwi in the WILD). We did reach our Thursday home in Hari Hari in time for the the "Criminal Minds" marathon.