Day 12: Westside (reprezent!)
The West Coast of the South Island is like the Pacific Coast Highway (CA) with more ferns. We spent some time driving it, in varying weather conditions, but it was always pretty. Aparently land prices are pretty cheap or they wouldn’t put “livestock effluence disposal” sites on beach front property. Seriously.
Actually, most of the land was livestock grazing, but the above caught us by surprise. The secret that the brochures don’t tell you about are the sandflies, they find Marcus’ legs rather succulent. Perhaps that is why Kiwi’s wear pants and there is tons of coastline left undeveloped.
We stopped by a seal colony and watched them sunbathe and play around a bit, but the pictures aren’t worth it. Marcus thought this beach looked cool.
We took a very rough ride (good thing it was a rental) over a gravel road (Kelly was thankful she wore her sports bra) for about 15km… it was almost a off-road adventure. The goal was to get to a hiking spot for the Oparara arch that turned out to be an enourmous 200m long by about 40m high limestone tunnel through a mountain.
The arch in part of it’s glory. Note that’s a tree growing inside the tunnel on the lower right.
On the way out, we ran into a huge snail that was the size of a full-grown dog. That’s a $0.05 kiwi coin (about halfway between a dime and nickel). The last guy that tried to harvest this snail for escargot was eaten. 😉
Tags: New Zealand
Kelly & Marcus
March 25th, 2005 at 4:02 pm
Darrick said hes hungry after seeing the snail….
March 27th, 2005 at 1:24 pm
I’d hate to have seen Darrick’s toes get eaten! The snail was salivating when we showed him pictures of Darrick. 😉
March 28th, 2005 at 5:21 pm
unbelievable snail! sounds like you all are having a great time..i’m enjoying reading about your journey, keep it coming!