Pacific: 2024

New Zealand Franz Josef glacier

Today we were on our way to the Franz Josef glacier and we were both pretty excited since neither of us had ever seen a glacier.

We stopped for about 2 hours in the town of Hokita, basically the jade "hub" of the south island. I bought some paua shell jewelry, also quite common in Hoki town and good prices.

Matt spent the 2 hours in a second hand book store but never really found anything worth reading.

Matt and Cynthia (to be continued)

New Zealand Greymouth Park

We met back up mid-afternoon - me with lots of great jade and Matt well on his way to being blitzed.

We thought that maybe some fish n chips would be just the thing to round out a perfect day so we got very cheap, very greasy takeaway and went to the Greymouth holiday park which turned out to be directly on the beach.

We ended up eating right on the beach and looking for jade while the sun set. Of course we didn't find any but it was fun looking.

Matt and Cynthia (to be continued)

New Zealand Greymouth River

We were on our way to Greymouth, home of the famous Greymouth River and more importantly, Monteith's Brewery. Now there is a lot of good beer in New Zealand but, to Matt at least, Monteith's is the finest.

I didn't have much interest in beer brewing because Greymouth had another asset: lots and lots of jade. We had read that jade actually washes up on the beach here and I was quite anxious to find out if this was true but first..........lots of jade shops. We split up; I in search of jade and Matt in search of beer. We were both very happy.

New Zealand Punakaiki

We left Westport and made our way down the coast to Punakaiki, home of the Pancake Rocks. We made it there pretty early and the rocks were spectacular, the coastal area around the rocks even more so.

We had an agenda today though, so we had to move on.

Matt and Cynthia (to be continued)