We dragged the teenagers out of bed (much moaning and groaning) stocked up on ginger beer and biscuits and hit the road. The younger two were up and raring to go. Arthur's pass is the name of the little village and park in the middle of the pass and is locally used to refer to the entire road that passes through the Alps to the other side.
We left Ashburton and headed to Methvin (near Mt Hutt where the skifields are I'm sure there will be lots of discussion about that once they open on June 9th if we get some snow that is). Then following directions from Matt's hunting buddy, Greg, we ventured off the beaten path onto some non-maintained roads (even google maps will not include them in the directions, though you can see them if you zoom in). One of which was appropriately named ZigZag road because that was the course it followed up the mountainside.
So where the two little dots are together we got off the main drag and took the short cut via Lake Coleridge and Mount Olympus. We joined up with the purple route near the "g" of springfield. I'm not sure if it saved us any time but the scenery was beautiful.
Our detour:
After we joined onto the proper road (haha proper road I kill me) the temperature took a big drop from the mid 20's to about 4C. Twas chilly. One thing about New Zealand, they take potty stops seriously. There are well marked public toilets all along the route often with accompanying hiking trails.
Further on the pass we met up with some Kea birds while looking at the gorge (ack) that we had to drive through/around.
Kea birds can be very aggressive and have been known to tear a car to bits. However, these ones were pacified with ginger biscuits (even though we were not supposed to feed them but we had to get them off the van somehow).
Almost all the way through the pass we stopped in Jackson and had lunch. After talking with the bar-man we changed our route slightly and headed a bit north to Greymouth and Shantytown. Shantytown is a restored gold mining village / tourist trap. It was a fun thing to do for the afternoon as the rain clouds were moving in. We took a ride on the steam train and the driver let Luke and Jamie ride up front (not sure if they were allowed to drive??)
(I cannot get this picture to rotate, if you know how tell me please)
After our train ride the kids panned for gold! They each found some flakes (no nuggets, darn) and had a cool souvenir.
Just as we were finishing panning for gold the rain moved in and we headed out. But Matt had a surprise stop planned at Garth Wilson Jade where he bought me a greenstone pendant.
Mine is like the centre one. It is two Koru (ferns) meant to represent the two of us together. Garth is a member of two Maori tribes from the west coast, the Ngati Mahaki and Ngati Waewae. New Zealand greenstone or Pounamu is Nephrite Jade and is very hard and must be carved with diamond tools. By New Zealand law all pounamu belongs to the Maori and only these two tribes are allowed to fossick for jade. But if you find a jade rock on the beach that is ok, you can keep it. You should never buy a jade pendant for yourself, it should be given to you by someone else.
We finally got on our way to Hokitika (the original destination) and found our cottages.
We stayed at Shining Star Cottages which were right on the beach. We had two cottages in the same little building, one for the boys and one for the girls. The kids loved it as the cottages had CABLE. They had been feeling a bit deprived in the TV department and enjoyed a quiet evening in our own space with two televisions to chose from (though at one point different people were watching the same show at the same time, yeesh).
After a bit of R&R we took a stroll to the Glow Worm Dell, which is a little fenced off path just across the road from our cottages where you could see the glow worms. This was way cool and everyone loved it but the photography did not live up to the moment.
Glow worms are little creepy worms that create fluorescence to lure other insects to their hanging sticky threads so they can catch and eat them. But they are pretty at night, when you can't see the rest of them.
Day 2 coming up...
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