The Wild Wild West Part 1

With my knees still a bit shaky from the previous days´ marathon walk I wasn´t too sad to spend another day in the bowels of Jagger, driving to our next destination, the rough West Coast of NZL. It is famous not only for its gold digging history or its Jade mines but even more so for its bad weather. The place in New Zealand with the most sunny days is separated from the the region with the most rainy days by just a few hours drive. And we were going towards the wrong direction...


Life can be rather single-sided on the West Coast

Luckily our activities of the following days didn´t require good weather. On the contrary, it mainly just amplified the coarse atmosphere of the region. We visited the ragged cliffs near Greymouth and marveled at the spray gushing out of every crack in the Pancake Rocks.


Cape Foulwind with Captain Foulwind


Hollow promises


Pancake Rocks! (it does)


A (blow)hole in the Pancake

One morning of particularly bad weather, we did the best thing you could do in such a situation: we hid in a cave. To be exact, we followed the advice of a lady who once lived in the one-horse-town Charleston, which, according to her, has the most glow-worm rich cave in NZL. So we took the tour, including a hair-raising 5km/h lilliput train ride through the jungle and, after the obligatory safety instruction whorthy of a big international airline, we were allowed to enter the fenced-off tracks of the cave. It was quite a different experience to our cave exploring adventures in Lao, but nevertheless very informative. After that - and a lengthy safety briefing - we jumped into our (truck tire) tubes floating on an underground river. That was quite something, to lie in the tube, with the head tilted back comfortably in complete darkness while we were being dragged quietly past thousands of blue glowworms (the only known natural cold light source) sticking to the highest parts of the ceiling, thus forming swirling and sparkling galaxies in the cathedral-like cavern above us.


The fantastic four (Audrey, Julie, Stevie, Stephan) and our guide (front)


Two fat glowworms


The most adrenaline-rich 2 seconds of the trip

Due to Stevie's harsh pacemaking at Abel Tasman we were so far ahead of our schedule that we even could afford to engage in some more bourgeois tourist activities like shopping in Hokitikas Jade manufactories or digging for gold in Ross. Stevie proved to be pretty enduring at gold digging, whereas I couldn´t wait to use our digging pan as a new, bigger vessel for pasta.


Our success can be easily measured by the look on Stevies face.

See us getting wild at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephan_mittas/sets/72157614032231019/