New Zealand - West Coast

The West Coast, or ‘the Coast’ as locals call it, is a wild place of rivers, glaciers, rain forests, and rugged coastline.  We saw so many beautiful landscapes it seemed like we were always pulling off the road to take pictures. We learned the sandfly lesson the hard way at our first stop. We left the car doors open as we took a few pics.  When we got back in the car it was infested with sandflies.  It was the Sandflies vs Lynn as I became the official sandfly swatter for the next few miles - it wasn't pretty.   Between Kingsley and I we had at least 50 bites. Sandfly bites are so much worse than mosquito bites as they remain itchy and sting for days after. 

An interesting Maori legend about the sandflies:

New Zealand sandflies (which are actually a different insect and a type of black fly) have a native Maori legend wherein "the god Tu-te-raki-whanoa had just finished creating the landscape of Fiordland, it was absolutely stunning... so stunning that it stopped people from working. They just stood around gazing at the beauty instead. The goddess Hinenuitepo became angry at these unproductive people, so she created the sandfly to bite them and get them moving.

The one thing that stood out to us as we drove down the coast was how few people we saw. Now I know why: "Never more than fifty kilometres wide, in the whole stretch of it down the west coast of the South Island there are only 31,000 people." 

Greymouth is the largest town - we stopped there for dinner one evening and at 8pm the entire place was a ghost town.  There was only one spot in town that was still open for dinner - the local Tavern. As a night owl at heart - I could never imagine living in a town where everything closed by 7pm. 




Punakaiki - the famous pancake rocks - we saw limestone rocks very similar to these on Jeju island in Korea.  I was impressed to learn there are only a few places in the world where this kind of rock structure exists and we have been to two of them!

Goofing around at the beach - we could be (and were) as ridiculous as we wanted with no one around to watch!


Christmas Moose at the local Tavern

As we got a little further south we hit some serious rain which caused some light flooding on the roads. Evidently the day after we drove through the town of Fox Glacier, one of the main bridges (which we had just driven over) was washed out by the heavy rains leaving people stranded for days.  





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