Today would involve a wee trip back into Hokitika before moving on to Franz Josef, further down the West Coast.
Appreciating that, whilst the wind and rough seas had both eased a tad, it was no longer T- Shirt and shorts weather plus, aware we had both been bitten by more sandflies from the previous evening, this called for a head to toe cover up strategy!
First port of call was the National Kiwi Centre…
We hadn’t appreciated how this flightless bird was now an endangered species, with the population of reducing by 2% each year…
…so we were privileged to see 2 males that had been reared at the centre from chicks😊
Julie then tried her hand at feeding another creature endemic to NZ, long finned eels no less, and catching freshwater crayfish in a mocked up wee lagoon😊
Moving on, after sampling another of NZ’s famous pies, I had another 1st…
Seeking out a local Barber I got my hair cut by a huge Maori man who was also a rugby prop forward 🏉😉….can’t imagine what we chatted about, but it definitely wasn’t holidays 🤪
We explored more of Hokitika in the afternoon, finding everyone we spoke to kind and helpful and quite willing to share their thoughts on, for example, some of the cultural tensions that exist.
They clearly love their art, examples of which are everywhere.
…and some of their artists have a great sense of humour…
The road over to Franz Josef includes a 6km stretch of alpine hairpins where the recommended speed limit for navigating these turns is 25kph (15 mph in old money)… plus it rained..
However, it’s not every day you get the chance to drive through a native rainforest and the visual rewards more than compensate…
Very quickly the road then transforms to a wide, flat, glaciated plain interspersed by the aquamarine waters of the rivers running off the mountains…
Arriving into Franz Josef itself the traveller is then presented with a small coastal town clearly geared up for the outdoor enthusiasts, especially activities exploring the glacier, which shares the same name as the town itself; all this set set against the dramatic mountain range – of which NZ’s highest, Aoraki/Mt. Cook, forms a part – mostly covered in the native rainforest; it’s off the scale stunning!
Full of the usual hotels, bars, outdoor gear shops and activities organisers, the thing that really struck us was the number of Helicopter operators offering everything from a quick 30 minute tour up to view a couple of glaciers to the full Heli-Hiking experience where you are flown to the top of a glacier, expertly led by a local guide in your crampons over the ice for 2 hours or so, then uplifted and flown back down to base😊
In a small town they must account for about 30-40% of what’s on offer.
Our site for 2 nights had been created in the rainforest, but still just a ten minute walk into town and must be the most magnificent campsite we’ve ever experienced…and we’ve rocked up to many!
A few hundred metres from this site there was a restaurant owned by one of the descendants of Alice May Parkinson, a convicted murderer for whom there was a huge campaign to get her full term (with hard labour) sentence overturned, so that made our dinner chat more interesting 😉
Finally, on returning to our campsite with it’s orange theme, we were treated to a magnificent sunset – clearly the sky had got the colour scheme memo too…
BTDU 