The West Coast

rugged solitude

By Heather & Pravin

April 1^st, 2019

Roys Peak

After the sleet and grey skies of Queenstown, we were happy to head towards the sun in gorgeous, lakeside Wanaka. There's a very popular hike that it seems like just about everyone who visits New Zealand has on their "must do" list, so of course we had to do it as well! The trail up Roy's Peak was a bit of a slog, just endless switchbacks as we worked our way up to the first lookout, but the views were absolutely stunning. We were lucky enough to go in winter, when there was hardly anyone up there, and we also started earlier in the day than most people. It was nice to be able to take our time and marvel at the views from the top, and we only had to wait for one group to finish taking their photos at the iconic viewpoint - apparently in the summer, you might end up waiting half an hour or more to get "that photo"!

From Wanaka, we spent a day driving the gorgeous Haast Pass on our way to the West Coast. The road winds its way through Mount Aspiring National Park, where there are countless lookouts, waterfalls, and short walks to explore. There was next to no one on the highway, and with perfectly clear blue skies, we made the most of the day and even detoured from the highway to take a drive to the very end of the road at Jackson Bay. There are no roads south of here along the coast, as the very rugged Mount Aspiring and Fiordland National Parks cover the vast coastal and mountainous wilderness area that stretches almost 300km southwest.

Franz Josef

Almost as soon as we started heading north on the West Coast, the weather took a turn for the worse. Aside from a rainy night in Queenstown, we had been extremely lucky with the weather up until that point. However, the West Coast is known for its rain, and we definitely got a good dose of it in Glacier Country! We braved the weather and spent a day walking around Franz Josef Glacier and Fox Glacier, and almost had the valleys to ourselves. You used to be able to walk right up to the glaciers themselves and clamour around as you please, but due to the vast distances that the glaciers have retreated, the faces of the glaciers are quite unstable and now you can only get on the glacier by taking a helicopter ride up to the top. Of course, this was well out of our price range and so we only got to view the glaciers from the end of the valley, therefore the snow and ice were still quite a significant distance away.

The most shocking part of visiting the glaciers was the series of signs along the visitor path showing where the glacier used to extend to in past years. Even just ten years ago, the Franz Josef glacier extended another 1.5km further into the valley, and about 150 years ago, when the area was surveyed by Europeans, the glacier would have extended almost to the sea.

Hokitika

Working our way up the West Coast, we had the opportunity to spend the night at quite a...unique...spot. It was rainy and windy and we weren't enthused by the idea of being cooped up in the van all afternoon and evening. When we found out that a local had purchased part of a closed-down psychiatric hospital located on the top of a hill overlooking the ocean and was operating it as a backpacker accommodation, we figured that we had to check it out. We were the only people staying there, and it was the eeriest spot! All of the furniture, artwork and appliances dated back decades and decades, and although it was great that we had the place to ourselves and could hang out in front of a heater all evening, we were super creeped-out and couldn't even bring ourselves to go wandering around at night. There were hospital beds with curtains surrounding them that served as dorm beds, and giant, institutionally-lit kitchen and bathroom facilities. In the end, we were more than happy that we had just paid to use the facilities and retired to our van for bedtime!

hokitika gorge

Out in the country to the east of Hokitika, the clouds parted just in time for us to see the brilliant blue Hokitika Gorge in the afternoon sunlight. We were bombarded by fantails, which are a very cute and very social bird that is native to New Zealand and named for its large tail plumage. They are incredibly curious and unafraid - as we were walking around the gorge, they would fly right up to us and bounce off our chests and shoulders!

The number of fantails that we saw on the West Coast was much higher than the number of people that we encountered on the coast. It's incredibly sparsely populated; the largest town, Greymouth, has a population of about 10,000, and the whole West Coast region (which stretches about 600km in length) has only about 30,000 people! The rugged coast and temperate rainforest, combined with the wet weather and low population density, definitely reminded us of some stretches of British Columbia coast back home.

A Small World

Continuing up the West Coast, our next destination was Greymouth. We spotted the quaintest little lifeboat parked outside the main square in town, and were delighted to discover that it was actually a coffee stand that also served amazing, freshly made Dutch stroopwafels. We stopped by for a treat, and ended up spending quite a while enjoying the company of Richard and Monique, the two Dutch folk that run the enterprise. In the strangest of spins, it came out that Richard had actually spent some time in Fort Langley, British Columbia (which is only a few minutes away from where I grew up), working for a Dutch family on a poultry farm. Coincidentally, he had also found himself hitchhiking through central British Columbia, and ended up finding work along the way at a forestry operation just outside the small town of Williams Lake, where Pravin grew up.

That evening, it occurred to us that an acquaintance of ours had written a children's book about a Dutch poultry farmer in Fort Langley, and we were dying to know if it happened to be the same family. We went back for more conversation (and coffee and stroopwafels) the next morning, and we couldn't believe that it was indeed the Dutch farmer about whom the book had just been written. I also found out later from my mom that we used to stop by the farm after preschool because you could go in and see some of the animals up close! It seemed far too much of a coincidence, and we decided that we would have to get Richard a copy of the book, Andy's Eggs. We enjoyed our time with Richard and Monique immensely, and they are two very special people that you should absolutely pay a visit to should you find yourself in Greymouth!

punakaiki

Punakaiki, colloquially known as "Pancake Rocks", is a popular natural feature on the seaside between Greymouth and Westport. The rock features are made from compressed fragments of ancient marine life (30 million years old!) that were cemented together by water pressure, and then gradually lifted out of the water by shifting seismic plates over time, and finally sculpted by wind and water erosion. There is a beautiful boardwalk walkway connecting some of the larger towers, and if you can time your visit around high tide, you might get lucky enough to see giant jets of seawater shooting out from some of the blowholes that have formed in the rock features.

Nelson Lakes national park

After the West Coast, we had plans to stay with some friends near the wine region of Blenheim. We had a couple of nights before we were due to arrive there, and Nelson Lakes National Park seemed like the perfect stopover point. We picked a short hike up to the bushline (our options were limited due to snow along other tracks), stocked up on all sorts of treats, and hiked up to a cozy hut with panoramic views of Lake Rotoiti and the surrounding mountains. The Bushline Hut had sleeping platforms for 14 people, but we were lucky enough to have the place all to ourselves. There was plenty of wood to get a cozy fire going in the stove, and once it got dark, the star-gazing was second to none as the skies cleared just in time to put on an epic show for us.

When your only car key breaks and you're locked out of your van...

Arriving in Blenheim, we decided to take care of a few "to-do" things (i.e. showering at the public pool) before meeting up with our friends at a brewery. One of our first stops was at The Warehouse to pick up a few things for the van, and as we were walking through the store entrance, Pravin let out an exclamation and held out our only key to the van, which he had accidentally broken into two pieces while trying to twist it back to straight. I immediately got very angry and let out a few choice expletives, then instantly felt bad and apologized profusely!

The fact that we had only one key had been bothering us for a while, and further south in Invercargill, we had actually gone to a locksmith to have the key duplicated. Unfortunately, he said that the key was in too rough shape to duplicate, and the only way to get another key cut would be to open up the innards of the driver's side door, get the specific number of the key and then using a Toyota database, cut a new one for us. However, he was far too busy to do it at the time and he was also going to charge an extortionate fee, so we decided to put it off, and just made a point of always being very gentle with our precious, slightly-twisted-near-to-the-point-of-breaking key.

Back to Blenheim and the broken key...outside the store, we pulled up our trusty Google Maps, and found that the only locksmith in town was a mere 300m away from where we were standing. We booked it over to the business, and explained our predicament to the owner. He took one look at the two pieces of the key and stated with confidence that he could duplicate it. In just a couple of minutes, from the broken, twisted pieces, he had managed to cut us a new key! We ran over to test it in the van, and it worked just fine. Of course, this time we were also sure to get a second key cut, just in case of any future incidents.

Had this happened only a week or two previously, we would have been in deep trouble! We might have been 120km down the treacherous one-way road into Milford Sound, several hours of driving from any auto or locksmith business, or perhaps locked out of the van at night in a frigid Mount Cook campground in -10°C weather...either way, this couldn't have happened in a better spot and we got extremely lucky!