We decided to check out the west coast of our island over Spring Break. There is a town called Hokitika (pronounced: Hah-ka-'tik-uh) that we have wanted to visit for a while. Famous for it's black sand beaches, jade rocks, and driftwood. Also famous for it's rain. They get 2875 mm of rain a year over there. (This is equal to: 9.4 feet!) We were planning to go for Christmas but all the locals suggested we not go then because we would be indoors all the time. So, for a fact finding mission we took a few days of Spring Break and checked it out. It rained most of the time but the WIND was something no one told us about. It was really, really windy. But very beautiful. And we got a great little cabin with it's own path to the beach. We could hear the waves crashing all day and night. Such a wonderful sound!
Gorgeous views on the way toward the mountains west of Christchurch.
We stopped at a little lake to stretch our legs. You can see which way the wind blows from the trees.
There are lots of braided streams in the wide valleys.
Otira Viaduct and a rockfall shelter/tunnel thingy.
The kids just loved that we got to drive under this diverted waterfall. I wonder what the American tree-huggers would make of this little engineering marvel...
Stolen from a random web site but it shows the viaduct on a sunny day. :)
Water-logged but scenic!
Those are not palm trees, they are FERNS!
They don't have billboards in NZ. Seriously, they don't. This is about the extent of it. A public service announcement. I'll drink to that!
Erik says you can tell this is a photo from early in the trip. The car is still tidy!
Family photo! That's a huge piece of drift wood we're sitting on. I thought it would make a great bench in the back yard but Erik refused to tie it to the roof of the minivan for me.
Look Mom! Take a picture of this rock!
Our little cabin. Caty is in the upstairs window.
We really liked the beach. The tide would turn quickly and suddenly you had to run for the dunes!
Awesome piece of driftwood in background. Photo bombers in foreground.
Windy! Hold on to your hat.
Windy!
The playground at our cabin.
Pretty flowering bush.
Inland view from the cabin.
Across the street from our cabin was Glow Worm Dell. A natural little dell (dfn: small wooded valley) filled with
glow worms. They are little larvae that send down a piece of silk that glows to attract flying insects. The insects get stuck and then the worm reels them in and eats them. Gross but they made the walls of the dell look like the night sky.
It looked like this.
A close up look.
No flash photography allowed at the dell but I found this image of their silk on the internet.
This is the best photo I took. It doesn't do it justice.
Cool black sand. Australia is out there somewhere.
Lots of great rocks. We found some jade too!
Maggie loves her backpack.
12 meters is 39 feet of rain! When they say it's a rain forest, they are serious!
Going on a hike to Hokitika Gorge Bridge.
Cate enjoyed the hike.
I love the ferns. Can't get enough.
Looking down at the gorge and bridge.
There it is!The water is a funny color blue-green from the minerals that get washed down.
Path to the bridge.
On the bridge!
I can't imagine going over the bridge in the backpack. But it didn't bother Maggie.
The far side.
Looking back.
Tributary stream.
Love it! This path led to a sheer cliff. We didn't get photos because we had to restrain the kids, they wanted to have a peek over the edge!
More lovely moss! I can't get enough green after living in Arizona.
A cool waterfall we discovered.
Maggie felt like getting out of the backpack and stretching her legs.
Back in the car. My little Linus with her pink blanket (she calls it Bellie).
At Dorothy Falls.
Dorothy Falls started way up high. We couldn't see the top of it from down below and couldn't see the bottom from above!
Daddy and Caty.
More of Dorothy Falls.
Greenery!
Umm...?
Free Range Children!
At a lake. Can't remember the name. :)
Throwing rocks in the water.
Hokitika Tower and main street.
Back on the beach at Hokitika.
I think this is Mt Cook/Aoraki.
More lakes.
Flax in the foreground, Mt Cook in the background.
Ferns under what reminds me of Joshua Trees.
Beds - Beer - Meals. What else is there, really?
This is Franz Josef Glacier. It is so beautiful. We are fortunate to be able to see it before it recedes entirely.
I made this one full size because if you look very carefully, you can see that some of the tiny black dots below the glacier are actually people. It's bigger than it looks in the photo!
We warmed up on the walk to the top of the hill.
I was so happy to see the glacier. I love glaciers! (Back in the day, I wanted to be a climatologist but the chemistry was too difficult.)
Happy family with Franz Josef Glacier in background.
There were thousands of waterfalls all around the area. Water was everywhere.
This pic is for Holly, Erik's sister. :)
Looks like the Wiggles were visiting as well! But we didn't see the guys. Or Capt'n Feathersword!
On the drive home to Christchurch I was thinking about those long drives with my parents through Nebraska blizzards. We had to buy chains to get home. We drove over the Southern Alps in chains for 4 hours at about 20 mph (MAX) or less. They should have closed the pass. There were semis stuck and we had to drive around one (the blue one above) just fitting between it and the guard rail and a huge drop off. No choice though. Blind curve behind us and the semi was sliding backwards!! It was a holy shit, Hail Mary moment if ever there was one.
Not a single police car, rescue squad, tow truck seen for the entire trip! Nothing. Just wilderness and people helping each other. We stopped for a man walking with an umbrella miles from any kind of service. He was in his 50's and said his mom and dad were waiting in the car for him and to tell them he was half way to the ski area (which was closed for some insane reason but I'm sure there were staff there). He said his father was recovering from a recent abdominal surgery. So when we got to their car, we stopped and were shocked to see his parents pushing their car UP a hill!!! We had zero room in the van. We could have put one adult but not all of them and they wanted to stay together. Of course one look inside our van and their choice was easy. The kids were going bonkers between begging to get out and play in the snow and fighting with each other or complaining that there was "nothing to eat" when in fact there was lots to eat, just no junk food.
Erik putting the chains on and watching for cars.
At one point we thought we made it and took the chains off and in two minutes we were back in it (we have a decent map but couldn't tell where we were exactly - they don't use mile makers (or km markers) there are miles between any kind of monument or turn off. It's like nowhere I've ever been. It's such a small island but you'd think you were thousands of miles from civilization! We stopped for lots of people to make sure they were OK It was mostly Asian tourists. The Kiwis had the sense not to drive that road. The Asians probably thought it would be plowed. We did. We thought: "They'll be plowing because they haven't closed the pass." There were some Spanish people in an RV. We told them to turn around. They were never going to make it. Nice people though. They were just at the beginning of it all (because we were nearly through it).
Are we there yet?!
There were white-out conditions at a couple points. That made me nervous and we slid around up a few hills (with the chains on) and toward the end, the left wiper blade got frozen and slowed down and caught on the right wiper blade and got bent. So then we couldn't bend it back and had to drive with it lifted off the windshield, sticking up in the air! But hey, we made it home!
Yes, that's an RV and yes, it's stuck.
It's funny how little snow it took to make it slippery. It had been raining for a couple days before hand and under the snow was black ice.
White-knuckled at a few points but otherwise, we did alright.
It was a beautiful trip but I'm not going to the West coast again unless it's the middle of Summer.
