this year.

On our way from Fox Glacier up the coast we slowed down in Franz Glacier, but with the rain and fog decided to just carry on having already seen a glacier. It was a rather pedestrian drive this day, as the rain and fog hid the mountains from our view. We had talked about stopping in Hokitika, but when we pulled into town we didn’t find a holiday park that sold us, so we grabbed some groceries and drove the extra 45 minutes up to Greymouth.

In Greymouth we settled into a wonderful Top 10 Holiday Park that was right on the beach and had a Street Fighter II arcade machine, not to mention a neat jumping pillow in the play area. We thought we had hit gold when the front desk informed us that there was a brewery tour at 6pm that included an all you can eat BBQ. We said ‘um, yes’ and waited for the van to come pick us up and take us to the brewery. The nondescript black mini-van, with a ‘lovely’ smoking las driving bumbled down the road to the brewery, arrived, dropped us off at 6:03pm, and took off before we could even say thank-you. We turned to open the door to the brewery and it was locked. We looked in all the windows and couldn’t see a soul. We circled the building looking in windows trying to find the tour mid-way before giving in to the fact that we’d be walking 40 minutes back to our holiday park. We were less than impressed, and on returning to the holiday park learned that “oh, yes, we’ve had others complain about that too”. Gee, thanks for sharing that info now. This brewery was in our bad books for the rest of the trip. Thankfully I’d already discovered the brews by Mac’s Brewery and needed no other options for my time in New Zealand.

There’s not much going on in Greymouth, so we spent some of the evening sitting on the beach, and the rest in the cabin playing catch phrase. The following morning we decided to drive an hour north to check out some pancake rocks in Punakaiki before looping back around through Greymouth to head inland through Arthur’s Pass and back to Christchurch. The rocks were an interesting formation to view, and it does look line someone just finished making a tall stack on the edge of the island, then covered it with grey butter. It was nice to grab a long black coffee and wonder along the path that winds through the geological formations. It was probably one of the coolest paths I’ve been on.