Pounamu Presents

2 March 2010
Leaving Punakaiki we headed south (forgot to say it’s another sunny day) along the spectacular coast road between the Paparoa mountains and the Tasman Sea until we reached Greymouth, where the huge Grey River enter s the sea. Greymouth is a not a very big place (about 10,000 residents) but is the last town of any size on the part of the west coast so a chance to fill up with patrol and do a bit of shopping at the wonderful New World supermarket (the NZ equivalent of Sainsbury’s, the others, 4Square and Pac’n’Save aren’t quite up to our usual standard of Waitrose or M&S of which there seem no equivalent in NZ).
After Greymouth the road hugged a desolate stretch of coast for about 40km before reaching Hokitika, a place with a bit of a shantytown feel from its gold rush days of the 1860s but with nicely painted buildings and pavement cafés. A short digression now follows while we write about vegetarian food in NZ, overall we’d say six out of ten but could do better. Pasta with a variety of sauces is the sauces is the staple offering but filo parcels and stir-fries are also quite common but vegetarianism still has a long way to go as today’s episode in the ‘Café de Paris’ demonstrated: they had some lovely baguettes filled with egg, tomato chutney, salad, which came ‘with or without bacon’. We asked for 2 without bacon please, they explained that they all came with bacon and they would take the bacon out for us! Never occurring to them to make them without bacon and put it in for those that wanted it. We had a nice vegetarian lunch at the Adz Cafe a few doors along.
Hokitika has lots of craft shops and is particularly famous for its greenstone, a form of hard nephrite jade, which the Maori called Pounamu and used it in place of metal and used it to make war weapons, cutting and carving tools and very fine pieces of jewellery. We looked in several shops until we came upon the Craft Gallery Co-operative, where we bought each other’s birthday presents.

We carried on driving south, the road hugging the Southern Alps, through pasture land for dairy cattle and some large areas of native bush until we reached Okarito about 130kms further south. Here we did a bush walk described as ‘easy’. We think easy means ‘short’ rather than anything else as it went uphill quite steeply but it was worth it because at the top we had good views of both the rainforest and the lagoon.
Onto the glaciers. The glacier of Franz Josef forms a connection between the Southern Alps and the coast. We checked in at the lovely Glenfern Villas, where we were introduced to the unique alarm clock provided for guests.

Our villa has a view of the glacier, when the cloud lifts. As there was still some sun we went for a couple of walks to view the glacier, one to a high viewing point and the other to a kettle lake which provided reflected views. Our first reaction was that the glacier was not as large as we expected but the closer we got and saw people nearer to it than us as tiny dots we recognised its enormity and magnificence. It was wonderful to walk through temperate rainforest one moment and then be confronted by a wall of ice. There is a complicated meteorological explanation for this, which if you are interested you can Google, suffice it to say that this is one of the only places in the world where rainforest and glaciers exist side by side and the glaciers are also the fastest moving, with large chunks falling off at regular intervals, but strangely the glacier sometimes advances unlike every other glacier in the world which is retreating. Having said that it has retreated by about 6km in the last 150 years – that represents millions of cubic metres of ice. It was for this moment that we packed an extra fleece and waterproof clothing and of course it was warm and dry but we are not complaining.