Pancake Rocks, Kayaking and The Black Hole of Westport

Pete and I drove the car up the West Coast past some of the more boring scenery around the glaciers and up to the norther part of the South Island.

On our journey we saw the very interesting Pancake Rocks and stayed at the not at all interesting, and somewhat scary, Westport. The funniest thing about Westport was when the hostel owner showed us our room and had to explain that we needed to move one of the beds in order to be able to close the door. Anyway, as the sign leading into Westport says "If you want to see Switzerland go to Queenstown, if you want to see NZ go to Westport". Yup, that pretty much sums it up. Westport was a scary town.

Pancake Rocks

On the way from Westport to Nelson we went Kayaking on a beautiful river in a limestone gorge. The best thing about this is that there were no form to sign, no insurance disclaimer. They just chuck a couple of kayaks at you and point you upstream. I'm no canoeing expert but i'm pretty sure some sections of the river were grade II white water. At one point Kym couldn't achieve the required velocity to negotiate some rapids upstream but got out of his kayak anyway in 6ft deep water and the last I saw was him drifting downstream desperately clinging on to his boat. Very funny, and that wasn't even the hard part, just upstream we had to negotiate a fallen tree and multiple white water sections. Anyway, really good fun on the way back down.

Action Man (moments before "the event")

Anyway, we're now in sunny Nelson and tomorrow we're heading up to Farewell Spit on the bikes (that's right Pete is back). The knees are still very painful when cycling but a combination of Voltaren 25's and high alcohol Belgian style beer saw me through 40kms today so I figure there's no more excuses. Interestingly, the only time my knees didn't hurt was straight after the micro-brewery i'm seriously wondering what I should put into that second water bottle ;-)