Day 5: Nelson to Greymouth

We left Nelson this morning and made our way down through Buller Gorge to Greymouth. We were tossing up whether to head to Westport or not, but decided to skip it for this trip. Punakaiki (where the Pancake Rocks are - pretty famous apparently) is 45 minutes away. We were going to head there this afternoon for a look, but it's really cold and miserable outside. Not that we really mind; a rainy day is nice to relax.

Driving out of Nelson gave us an hour or so of very green and picturesque farmland, always with the mountainous backdrops.

Sick of mountains yet? A Norwegian couple were kind enough
to take our photo, and then freaked out when I offered to take theirs.
I think they expected me to steal the camera.

The trip today took about four and a half hours, maybe a bit longer with the stopping for photos, with a few quiet little towns nestled in the mountains, and lots and lots of single-lane bridges (very... exhilarating) inbetween serpentine roads and narrow little mountain passes. Buller Gorge was breathtaking, with regular views of the river (often whitewater) and most of the gorge road bordered by trimmed bushes, so it was like driving through a leafy tunnel. Needless to say, very pretty.

I took about 500 photos out the window of the car because there were very few places we could safely stop. It'll take a while to go through them to pick out the good ones, but here's a snap from the bridge which brought us into the gorge:

Looking roughly North (I think) from the Buller Gorge bridge
onto Upper Buller Gorge Road.

As we came out of the gorge, we were greeted with an eastern wall of mountains, mostly covered with low clouds and rain. I tried to take some photos, but they didn't turn out too well. Hopefully I can recover them when I get home, because it was quite a view, this gigantic wall of blue with clouds pouring down the slopes.

Then the rain set in and we arrived in Greymouth about 20 minutes later. We're eating in tonight because the motel has an oven in the kitchen and we're both sick of eating out. We'll probably spend the night in, too. There's not too much around Greymouth (within 30 minutes drive, at any rate). Tomorrow, after checking out Punakaiki, we're off to Franz Joseph and the glacier region - I'm pretty excited about that!

And an update on the GPS: Garmin FINALLY emailed me back... and told me to call Australian customer service. Bravo. Clap clap. They did however include a link that I couldn't find on their website with a NZ customer service branch, and I called them and within 30 seconds had a link added to my account to download NZ maps, so hopefully tomorrow we won't be navigating via badly written instructions copied off google maps. Or better, one of those tourist maps that represent roads in the same way someone waves their arm around to point roughly Northish.