Haast to Greymouth (and beyond?)

Fri, Nov 12, 2009

Today it has certainly felt like we've been in the misty mountains. The clouds have been hung up in the mountains, obscuring the peaks, so we have not been able to catch sight of them. This side of the island is pure rainforest. This side of the island is rainforest and hillsides that face the sea are dense with shrubs and trees that look like giant stalks of broccoli. Every inch of the forest floor is covered with huge ferns, some growing very high until they look like trees themselves. It is so incredibly lush.

We alternate driving through the forest and driving along the coast. Along the coast, the ground is more flat and open. We are driving down at sea level today, not up on the cliffs negotiating hairpin turns. Just nice straight road for a change. Cows and sheep and even herds of deer can be seen grazing in bright green fields. No need to irrigate over here. We pass over long, single-lane bridges that stretch over the rocky river beds that are currently running at what must be a trickle compared to when they run full, because they are incredibly wide. I imagine after a heavy rain in the mountains, these rivers must be torrents. It would be an awesome sight to witness..

Earlier this morning we stopped at the Fox glacier and hiked in to view it up close. I've never seen a glacier before, but I guess I was expecting to see a pristine, white snow mass, fading to blue where the snow is compacted down into ice. What it actually looked like was a huge pile of dirty snow like what's left in the spring in MN where the road crews have been piling it up all winter. As we looked at it more closely though, we could see that it was actually composed of hundred of layers of old snow and rocks so that you can no longer tell where the snow ends and the rock begins. Very cool. The cliff walls in the valley carved by the glacier are high and steep and all along the trail you can see where rock slides have let lose with hundreds of tons of rocks. Boulders as big as a house are scattered around like someone just tossed them out by the handfuls. We look really miniscule in comparison.

Hokitika

We've just gone for a short walk on the black beach here. We had every intention of going for a longer walk, but all the beautiful stones and the blowing black sand stopped us in our tracks. I doubt we went further than a few blocks, but it was fascinating. The beach is littered with hundreds of perfectly flat rocks, like pancakes scattered on the sand. The beach is wide right now since the tide is out and there is a clear delineation between the black sand on the higher part and lighter sand on the lower part. There is great driftwood and killer stones. Man I love these rocks.

Pancake Rocks / Punakaiki

We made a longer than planned stop at the pancake rocks, so named because of their hundreds of thin layers that make them look like stacks of flapjacks. There were a lot of folks there with very nice cameras and one fellow told us that at sunset the rocks will glow red, so we decided to stick around. The sky had a lot of clouds and we got some very nice sun rays coming through the gaps, but we never did get a proper sunset, so no glowing rocks. By the time we got back on the road, the sky was dusky and we lost light really fast, so that the final leg of our trip was pretty much in the dark and it began to feel like we would never get there. When we finally did pull into the motor camp, we got what surely must have been the final powered site there. We wound up parking behind the utility building, kind of tucked under a water tank. Not the most glamorous view we've had, but it was a place to plug in and sleep.