crazyscot

Nights spent away: 4
Sandfly bites: 8 (at last count)
Lakes circumnavigated: 1
Glaciers walked on: 1
Waterfalls collected: 1
Things bought: jade pendant
Things made: knife

An action packed five day holiday, and no mistake. Where to begin?

Day 1. Chch-Fox Glacier township (404km).

A magnificent alpine drive which we've done before, but it was interesting to see which bits we remembered and which we didn't. We didn't really stop enroute, other than to eat our lunch, sigh at the tourist child feeding a kea in defiance of all the signs asking one not to, and for petrol.

To pass the early evening, and stretch our legs, we found our way to Lake Matheson and walked around it. This was made much easier by there being a cafe/restaurant there which opened for dinner...

Day 2. On the ice.
Up early and to the glacier guiding centre, where we got a little stressed at there being only one breakfast spot in the township (as far as we could see) and it being very busy. Nevertheless our food arrived in the nick of time, then we were issued with boots and crampons and hustled onto the bus. We had been here before, too; but only as far as the end of the public walkway. The terminal face looked different, illustrating the dynamic glacier environment, but this time we were guided up onto the ice.

Wow.

What you notice at first as you approach the ice is the temperature; despite the bright sun, the thermal mass of all that ice causes the wind blowing down it to turn cold.

A mostly-white landscape with hints of light blue and a lot of mucky rock fragments and crevasses everywhere. Barren, yet simultaneously fascinating. While sun melts ice, heavy rain melts it even faster. As water flows over the glacier it carves out channels for itself, many of which descend into the interior as features called moulins (mills). Our guide told us a tale of a tourist accidentally dropping his camera into a moulin... the camera then emerged further down the glacier some five years later, smashed up but the memory card was intact, and the owner had been canny enough to put his business card as the first shot on the card... he was overjoyed at being reunited with his photos.

All too soon, our time on the ice was over and we returned to the township for a late lunch.

To pass what was left of the afternoon we looked at the map and took the only road leading out of town that we hadn't driven on yet. This was the interesting, if nerve-wracking, drive to Gillespies Beach. I didn't think to get a photo of the plethora of warning signs at the beginning; it is a narrow, winding, unsealed, largely unfenced road with blind corners, steep gradients and sheer drops that snakes its way for some 11km along the not-very-compliant rainforest hillside. I didn't think to film it, but somebody has: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsbRNPcpjrA

Unpeeling my white knuckles, and not looking forward to the drive back, we marvelled at the official-but-informal campsite (no facilities apart from a composting loo) and loitered on the beach for a while. There were more people there than I expected for the edge of the edge of nowhere; we seem to have blundered into a well-kept secret.

Returning to the township (and unpeeling my white knuckles once more) we meandered around in search of dinner, and stopped to have a brief encounter with some keas in a hotel car park. There were six of them perched on a fence, hoodies pulled up, shrieking and calling and generally threatening to cause mayhem :-)

Day 3. Fox to Greymouth (196km).

A leisurely drive. (Who am I kidding! The West Coast road between Fox and Franz is winding, steep, hairpin-tastic though not quite as insane as the Gillespies Beach road.)

We stopped off in Ross for lunch and to visit one of the local jade carvers so I could get myself a pendant from a source we were fairly sure was honest NZ and not imported jade nor plastic crap. We stopped off again in Kumara Junction, more of a place than a township, to take some evidence of the rather exciting attitude they have to integrated transport system design on the west coast.


At its worst this line carries four trains a day on the Greymouth-Hokitika branch line, and the west coast road is pretty quiet too, so it's not as if it needs anything fancier.

As if that wasn't enough we were then treated to the road+rail bridge over the Tamarakau!

After reaching our motel we went on for a drive to explore Greymouth breakwater - it was raining, typically for the west coast - and Cobden on the other side of the river. I surmised that it would be interesting to live there, but would probably get old - and the rain very depressing - very quickly. (Side note: very tasty curry that night, from the Priya.)

Day 4. Barrytown.

A day with a difference, as we had booked ourselves on the knife-making workshop just up the road in Barrytown. Run by a couple who just happen to have a workshop, you start with a pre-cut chunk of rolled steel, pre-cut brass bolstering and pins, and a sheet of rimu (local wood).

Now while I had a weekend's forging experience before, that was only a tiny part of the day's activity. You start by forging and annealing the blade, then roughly sand it down. Glue and rivet on some bolstering, then cut two pieces of wood to make a handle for it. Glue, drill and pin the handle onto the metal, then sand down the edges of the wood so it's flush with the metal. Poke a little fast-setting polystyrene resin into the gaps (so the end result will be food-safe), and it's lunch time.

During lunch, Steve did the serious (boring) bulk sanding-down of the handle's main faces, and the resin, to be flush with the metal.

Now the work pieces started to resemble knives. Steve put an edge on them, then had us sand down the blades with increasingly fine sanding belts, then wet-and-dry paper, then metal polish to work up a mirrored finish. We applied leather dye as a wood stain (yes, really), polished everything once more, and it was done.

There were thirteen of us taking part that day.


Day 5. Drive home (245km).

And so the final day, which itself had no small plans. We drove the scenic route by Lake Brunner. Drawing a gloss over the idiot cyclists who invited us - quite unambiguously, we both thought - to overtake when there was oncoming traffic, we had planned a walk to the Devil's Punchbowl waterfall near Arthur's Pass.

The walk is on DOC land, and a few years ago they installed a viewing platform for one's comfort and convenience. However, there's a chap who's really into waterfalls on these isles, and he doesn't like the platform; he says so in nearly as many words in his book, that it ensures safety at the cost of the view. He recommends getting up close to the plunge pool via a tricky scramble up an area prone to rockfalls - so we meticulously left the path, passed the DOC sign warning of the danger of rockfalls, and pressed on up. It was a pretty horrid scramble, all told, with difficult footings, damp (untrimmed) vegetation concealing holes and rocks, and a choice of three paths at one point which all looked pretty hopeless. But it was well worth it to get up close to the crashing of the plunge pool, the significant downdraft and the spray.