Down the west coast

We had one of our best days so far on our trip, when we woke up in Charlston on the west coast. We started the day by donning some crazy wetsuits, flipper gloves and caving gear and headed down some limestone caves. Then we hopped into some massive inner tubes and serenly floated down an underground river, staring at the glow worms on the roof above (sadly impossible to take photos), then came out into the light and raced down some rapids.
Check out http://www.caverafting.com/ well worth a visit if you're down that way

Nicky was fairly adamant that we visited Cape Foulwind, for the photo op alone, but I'm glad we went there as the violent sea and a storm coming in as the sun went down was spectacular.

Cape Foulwind

A long way from home
After drying off and warming up, we made our way down the rugged coastline to Punakaiki, home to the 'Pancake Rocks'.

The cliffs are made up of layers of sedimentary rock that have weathered at different rates, hence the 'pancake' formations. The cliffs have also been weathered in such a manner that the sea has carved out caves that have fallen in, so the tide rushes in and shoots upwards and outwards in blowholes. It was very impressive, and quite intimidating. Like the earth was an angry beast snarling at you. The 'Sudden Sound' blowhole was our favourite, but we ran out of memory to film it, so have a look on youtube.com

Below is a film of the the 'Chimney' blow hole at Punakaiki, featuring a strangely unimpressed sounding commentary

We managed to avoid the penguins, but wished they'd had similar signage for the over efficient traffic police, who love nothing better that jump out on foreigners in vans. I picked up a 630NZ$ fine for being 49kph over the limit. Now this does sound bad, I admit, but the circumstances didn't deserve the frightenly large fine. Its 100kph limit on the open road in NZ, about 60mph, so I was pottering along a nice wide straight stretch of single carriageway, when all of a sudden the road turned to a temporary surface and a 30kph (practically walking pace) limit was put in force. I didn't want to drop the anchors on the gravel, and the road was wide and straight so i let my speed drop quite slowly. He zapped me at 79kph soon after entering the 30 zone and insisted that seeing as he'd zapped me, he had to issue the ticket. No recognition of the situation at all. More strange was this Barrytown Policeman's suggestion that we shouldnt bother paying the fine, because we were leaving the country soon and wouldn't get caught. Not the best thought out plan, given that we were in a hire car, and they do checks on you when you leave the country to see if you have any outstanding fines to your name...

Next stop were the Franz Joseph and Fox Glaciars, beneath the mighty Mount Tasman and Mount Cook, before an amazing drive down the beautiful lake Wanaka

Franz Joseph

Fox

Parked up alongside Lake Wanaka for the night