Farewell Spit, Wesport to Greymouth Drive, Frans Josef & Fox Glaciers

After Able Tasman, we drove to Takaka where we found a hostel and settled down for the night - it was nice to have a warm, dry place to get ourselves back in action.  The next day was beautiful and we set off to go see the Farewell Spit which is the northwest tip of the south island.  It's a 30km sandspit that just out into the ocean - quite interesting (if you recall we could see this spit at one point during our Able Tasman trip).  We just went to the base of the spit and looked out upon it - didn't acutally go out onto it.  They have overpriced tours if you want to go out onto the spit but it's pretty expensive and in my opinion, not worth it (I suppose that's not fair for me to say considering I didn't do it...  oh well - saying it nonetheless.  I think it was $100 to drive out the 30km spit private road.)  We did see some cool Black Swans there though - and a hedgehog... not sure why Sega had a game called Sonic the Hedgehog - from what I observed, Hedgehogs are one of the slowest creatures on earth, surpassed solely by the snail (Sonic the Snail - it's got a ring to it).  I also eagerly looked for Natalie Portman but alas, she was nowhere to be seen - bummer.

From the Farewell Spit we backtracked a bit and then headed down to Westport where we spent the night. The next day we drove from Westport to Greymouth - this route is said to be one of the top 10 drives in the world (Lonley Planet).  It was pretty impressive - for the most part you are along the coast and the GIANT waves are crashing into the bays below you.  Up to this point I had not seen any waves that came close to rivaling the size of the waves I had seen in Kauai for Ty & Nat's wedding last April.  These waves were as big or bigger - F'ing huge... difficult to tell from the shore but I'm guessing 15 feet.  Apparently this coast is one of top spots to surf in NZ - I can see why.  The problem is that the water is pretty chilly so you need a killer wetsuit.  Anyways, the drive lived up to the hype and was super scenic.  The "Pancake Rocks" is a neat pit-stop mid-way which shows off some fancy geological formations (I won't speculate what these are and will wait for the geologists to comment based on some pictures below).  It's apprently a big geological mystery though.  These were super cool though and well worth the walk-about.  The water is basically carving away pieces of the land and you end up with these pillars and caves/tunnels where water crashes in and as the giant waves come pounding in.  I have an amazing video showing how the water come crashing into the formation and then when the waves are really big water comes spraying out these vertical holes like geysers... you can see some of the spray in the photos below but the video will have to wait.

We hit Greymouth and tried to do a brewry tour at Monteith's Brewing Company however they were doing a major reno and it was closed - doh.  Instead we hit up McDonalds for an hour or so to catch up on internet and get some grease into our system - this is a regular occurrence for us as few places offer free intenet and good old McD's is our trusty source.

After Greymouth we headed towards Wanaka and hit up a couple glaciers on the way - Frans Josef and Fox Glaciers... pretty neat - see photos below!

Oh yeah, we swam in Westport at their pool - first time swimming (I hit the ocean for a brief period on Able Tasman but it was pretty chilly).  The pool was super cheap and we've now realized this is the best way for us to get a nice warm shower, and a workout.  So now we keep camping in these dirt cheap primitive campgrounds and then hitting up the local pools - score for us.  We are getting into this whole cheap-o budget traveling thing...

Ok - till next time... peace out.
Kyle