A four-day trip south

The original plan was to leave Beaconstone on April 9, hook up with my friends Wade and Lisa LeBlanc from Hong Kong/Nova Scotia in the tourist-swamped glacier town of Franz Josef, and then return to Beaconstone on April 15 for two more weeks of WWoofing.

Of course, things don’t ever work out exactly as planned. Poor Lisa works too hard and got a nasty infection just before leaving Hong Kong. They still flew to Christchurch but were held up there longer than anticipated. And with Lisa being as sick as she was, she was in no shape for any aggressive glacier climbing, so our much-anticipated hook-up was kyboshed. I’m only getting over it now…

On our way down the coastal highway, Drew and I explored the wild food (link to wild food festival website) town of Hokitika, or Hoki as it is locally known. Each year the town hosts a driftwood sculpture competition on the black-sand beach. Hoki also has this beautiful old library that is now home to the tourist information centre (what town in New Ziwi doesn’t cater to tourists?)

Hoki also claims to be the greenstone capital of the country. Pounamu, or New Zealand jad, is collected from many of the surrounding rivers and carved in town. There are at least a dozen galleries selling the stuff, and shoppers to have to beware about cheap imports. Drew bought me a jade necklace back in February for my birthday (in the shape of a koru, or fiddlehead, which means new beginnings) but he elected to carve his own pendant. He would do it after we hiked the Franz Josef glacier.

While we’ve welcomed the warmth and comfort of the futon beds at Beaconstone, we were also jonesing to camp again. So we opted for a campsite 33kms east of Hoki, at Lake Kaniere. It reminds us of lakes back home. With only a few dozen cottages on the eastern side, it was really peaceful, and while it is autumn, it wasn’t at cold at night as we anticipated.

Before hitting the glacier towns further south, we drove a few more kilometres east through a valley with lots of dairy farms to visit the aqua-blue waters of the Hokitika gorge. We were both blown away by the colour and chose to have our breakfast on some rocks before the rain started.

As mentioned before, we hit really shitty weather at the glaciers – 25 mm per hour – but they took us up regardless. Our guide Andrew was friendly and laid back, and because of the weather, our group wasn’t too big.

The ironic thing was the next day we planned to hike up the first portion of the Copland Pass to Welcome Flat hot springs – a series of naturally-occurring hot pools – but because the weather was so terrible, we changed our plans to head back to Hokitika so Drew could carve his own jade pendant. There I was, standing on the beach in Hoki, with gorgeous clear views of the snow-capped Southern Alps. The pendant came out beautifully. It is a replica of the silver star my dad brought back from Slovenia for me when my oma (grandmother) passed away last fall.

On the way back to Beaconstone, we stopped off in the boring town of Greymouth for the noon-hour Monteith’s Brewery tour. Like so many local breweries, this one has been bought up by a conglomerate so most of the beers are now brewed in Auckland, however they still do batch brewing. It was a really down-home type of tour where we were allowed to stick our heads over the open vat of fermenting beer (quality control?) and then pour ourselves as many pints as we could handle before the tour finished at 1:30 p.m. I, of course, was DD.