Punakaiki - The Pancake Rocks

Our journey down the west coast of the South Island continues! From the sleepy settlement of Murchison where we spent the night, Paul drove through the Buller Gorge - lots of winding roads and hairpin bends, up and down mountains. From hillside gorge, the scenery become more tropical as we approached the coast. The destination of the day was visiting the pancake rocks at Punakaiki. If you look closely at the rocks, it looks like they are pancakes stacked on top of each other. Geologists are unsure how this happened. The coastal scenery was beautiful - we found many deserted beaches where no one was in sight.

We were planning to visit Fox Glacier tomorrow - so Paul had to keep on driving. We passed the towns of Greymouth and Hokitika which were fairly large and bustling for the South Island. It seems we have hit the area just as Hokitika was having its "Wild foods" festival - crocodile, bugs, fried worms etc. Lots of New Zealanders from all round the country have descended on the area and booked out all the accommodation. We decided to have dinner in Hokitika where I tried whitebait (just little white fishies) and drive on further to find a bed. We ended up in Harihari - in the middle of nowhere again.There were maybe two motels and one supermarket. Just how we like it.