Wonderful day today!

We started the day with an hour-long drive north from Greymouth along the Tasman Sea.  Rugged coastline on our left, steep tree-covered mountains on our right.

First stop in Paparoa National Park was the Pancake Rocks and Blowholes. It’s one of the few places I’ve ever been where you see lots of folks heading down the trail wearing a variety of expressions – tired kids, grumpy parents, everyone trying to do too much on vacation – and then see everyone coming back wearing smiles of delight. 

The Pancake Rocks are an unusual limestone rock formation.  It looks as if, when the limestone was being formed below the sea 50M years ago, every once in a while a layer of sand or mud was deposited so the stone is in layers.  They no longer believe that’s how they were formed.  Instead, they think it was something called stylobedding, when the pressure from the weight of the stone and water actually caused some minerals to go into solution. When conditions changed, the minerals deposited out into layers.  It didn’t make much sense to me … more research required.

I’ve seen blowholes before, but nothing like these. It turns out that we happened to arrive at a “king” high tide, so even the locals all said they hadn’t seen the water so high before either.  The photo below is the same lcation as the photo above, but the water has just come in and the blowhole is doing its thing. Amazing!

We had then planned to go kayaking on the the Pororari River in the park, but there was so much rain yesterday that they closed the river to kayaking.  So we walked the Pororari River Track through the gorge instead.  When we saw the speed of the river, we were sure glad we weren’t kayaking upstream against it.  The gorge was gorgeous, as was the woods along the way and the fast-flowing tannin-colored river.  We had lunch at the end of the first part of the track enjoying the view of the cliffs on each side of the gorge. We were joined by a weka, a flightless bird which resembles a kiwi and is also somewhat rare in New Zealand.  This one was used to being fed by folks eating at that particular bench.  Although cute, he was a real pest.  He managed to undo the elastic band Rich had around his water bottle and he kept sneaking up from different directions trying to get at our food and our jackets.

Here's a photo of the river gorge we walked through.

 

Then we did another walk on the Truman Track, also in the park.  This track leads to a wonderful beach with limestone cliffs which have been carved by the waves of the Tasman Sea. 

By then, we were getting tired, but ice cream kept us going!  We drove back to Greymouth and along the beach to Elizabeth Point.  We came back after dinner to watch the sunset over the Tasman Sea.  By the time the sun was ready to set, the cloud cover was back.  But I loved the photos I got before that happened.

We're off across Arthur's Pass in the Southern Alps tomorrow, heading to Lake Tekapo near Mt. Cook.