It’s been a busy few days. On Thursday we boarded the coach and drove off towards Westport on the west coast of the south island. It’s a fantastically scenic drive through the southern alps; a mixture of rocky outcrops, rainforest and snow-capped mountains straight out of a movie scene. En route we stopped off to do a trek up to a waterfall - Punchbowl Falls, we spotted mountain parrots called Keo’s and crossed a draw bridge over the very picturesque and reflective Lake Brunner. Once in Westport a few of us paid to take a ride on the ‘Jet Boat‘, a suped up speedboat without a propellor; the dual 6.3 litre engines suck up water and pump it back out at a rate of one tonne per three seconds. The guy took us to a lake and zoomed around for a while, narrowly missing the rocks that line the water and doing 360 spins. It was a very nimble beast, and we sat on her to watch a superb sunset.
On day two we went from Westport to Lake Mahinapua, via the winding West Coast Road. More scenery of splendid diversity greeted us on the way down, but before that we did a 45 minute walk at Tauranga Bay where we saw one of New Zealand’s largest seal colonies. Later on we stopped for lunch at Pancake Rocks. The name comes from the way the limestone stacks have been eroded over thousands of years to look like piles of pancakes. From the lookout here we spotted some birds in the penguin family and quite a few dolphins only a little way out to sea.
Our stop for the night was Lake Mahinapua Hotel, run by a very funny - and very old - bloke called Les who looks a lot like Father Christmas. There was a fancy dress theme for the night. We either had to go in 60s, 70s or 80s attire, or a superhero, or anything beginning with P (i.e. policeman, princess, pregnant mum, paedophile…) After racking my brains for a good five or so minutes I went with the letter P vibe and picked up a cheap yellow t-shirt, blue shorts and socks, a $2 pair of football boots from a charity shop and some brown body paint and went as arguably the world’s greatest footballer of all time, Pele. I even bought a permanent marker and wrote ‘Pele’ number 9 on the back and drew the badge on the front. I proudly took home the achievement of most photographed person that night, and with all the effort involved turning myself into a black man I should think so too. I was in the shower for half an hour scrubbing it all off afterwards. A bloody funny night though.
Today was just about getting to Franz Josef, a glacier township in National Park surroundings where I’ll be climbing the Franz Josef Glacier tomorrow. We did stop for lunch at a tiny museum which was just a video really about deers. Believe it or not in order to start the process of farming deers they had to capture them from the mountains by flying a helicopter up there, where one man would chase and hover over a running deer and another man would leap out of the moving chopper onto the deers back, tackling it to the ground. They’ve since invented the net gun so it’s not such a life threatening job anymore, but, bloody hell, imagine doing that sort of thing on a daily basis. Jumping out of helicopters onto speeding game. Would make an interesting addition to any CV, that.