Whitebait & a wild goose chase!

When I pulled back the curtains this morning the view was awesome, a double rainbow, one deeply coloured and the second much paler. It was so HUGE that I couldn’t take get it all in one photo!

After a leisurely start to the day, we left grey and dismal 
Greymouth and set off to explore Hokitiki, 

about a half hour drive south.

Yesterday we couldn’t quite believe this bridge and mum was not at all happy that we needed to drive over it again today…twice! It’s a one-way bridge shared with oncoming traffic and to add further excitement it is also shared with trains!

Hokitika is an attractive town with wide streets, historic buildings and excellent local craft studios. In the 1860’s it was a thriving commercial centre thanks to the discovery of gold. Its river port bustled with ships bearing miners flocking from the goldfields of Australia, but it was a very treacherous harbour where a ship went down every 10 weeks in the years 1865 and 1866!

Our first stop was Sunset point where we visited 
this shipwreck memorial & we had our first glimpse
 of the wild and driftwood-strewn Hokitika Beach.

Next…the Hokitika Glass Studio….we watched a glassblower at work and browsed the gorgeous selection of glass art pieces. Our wallets were considerably lighter when we left because each of us fell in love with and purchased a piece of the beautiful glass.

We wandered in and out of delightful galleries up and down the main street before deciding on a lovely little café for lunch. I had a whitebait patty, dad had whitebait with the lot which of course came with chips. Andrew had another venison pie and mum had her favourite; a Devonshire Tea…everyone was happy. We have also been very pleasantly surprised with the coffee here. The Hummingbird Coffee we first tried and enjoyed at a café in Christchurch happily seems to be the coffee of choice in most places.

By now the sun was shining and as suggested by a lady in one of the galleries we decided to visit Horitika Gorge and this is where the wild goose chase began…somehow we ended up at Lake Kaniere instead of the gorge…everyone blamed me! 

This is where we ended up.

Andrew was tempted to have a go at skipping some stones 
(aka chucking yonnies) and I tried too.

  

 We decided to give the gorge a miss 
and headed back to Greymouth.

The Grey River mouth, which has served the town as a port, has also delivered misfortune. Repeatedly throughout its history Greymouth has been submerged by floodwaters, including twice in 1988. Since then a floodwall has been erected, popularly called “the great wall of Greymouth”.

We walked along the wall to have a look at a memorial to those lost in coal mining accidents within the west coast inspection district. There is a very long list of names including the 29 men killed in an explosion at the Pike River Mine near Greymouth in 2010.

I’ll leave you with some of the picture postcard photographs 
that Andrew took today…

& the final photo…sunset from our bedroom balcony.