🙂 Great walking
🙁 COLD! Crash on Arthur’s Pass!
Beautiful sunrise and mist over the lake while we enjoyed breakfast. We encountered typical NZ road blocks…
Headed to Christchurch via Arthur’s Pass for fuel and food – lots of snow. The pass is beautiful and passes through magnificent glaciated valleys – plenty of evidence of falling rocks! Lovely to be back at Lorel’s and enjoyed a great evening together. Collected post etc and wrote letters and headed off again in the morning via Arthur’s Pass which had received a lot of snow. Hit a patch of black ice and van skidded, lost control and ended up in a ditch!Little damage other than a broken light and a broken bottle of red wine from the vineyard that we had been saving! Paul hitched a lift into town for help – chap assisted with tow truck – had to pay $100 for tow! Nice people at cafe gave us food after closing time as they heard about our ordeal. Into bed with heater on as freezing! -8C!
Next morning we headed back to cafe for breakfast and hot chocolate. Drove carefully over Pass! Drove to Cape Foulwind to see the fur seal colony – very smelly… the Cape lived up to is name!
We drove onwards to the Pancake Rocks at Punakaiki and had a lovely meal at the little cafe there. Very nice.
In the morning we headed on the Abel Tasman Coastal Path which was lovely. Walked until midday down to the beach, ate apples and then headed back to the van.
Zoomed on to Picton via Nelson and Queen Charlotte Sound mountian road with amazing mountain scenery. Managed to get on the 19h00 ferry crossing – annoying Canadian girl who tried to befriend us, so we gave incorrect details – eek… very rough and glasses fell off tables. Arrived at Wellington and stayed back at very expensive campsite…. but we were late. so got in for free and left very early, so felt vindicated that we had paid a fair price in the first instance after all! 🙂
Go to: New Zealand
