Hokitika

We planned to spend the next two days in Hokitika as we wanted to see if we could find a piece of greenstone on the beach. We have tried before and come up lacking, so we wanted this time to be successful.

The road to Hokitika though was so beautiful we had to make several stops. First though, we had to escape the wekas in the Westport park. They are so curious that one even came into the van when my back was turned.

The road south heads inland for a while, and we enjoyed our views of the inland rocky rivers. We stopped to explore a little at the Paparoa Scenic Reserve, which included walking along some of the narrow, outside edge of a bridge to get the perfect shot.

The coastline is rugged and beautiful.

Our next stop was to Punakaiki or the Pancake Rocks. We have been there before but were still not disappointed by this visit. The noise of the waves crashing into the blowholes is just as impressive as the views.

We finally arrived at the Hokitika NZMCA Park just before 4pm, but that still left us enough time for a beach walk (along the river banks) but that offered a disappointing selection of likely rocks.

Before we went to bed we decided to use a small amount of Dad’s legacy on a helicopter Glacier tour. Unfortunately, I mistakenly booked it for the next day, so we needed to head away from Hokitika early the next morning instead of staying the second night as we had planned. We hoped that we would be lucky with the weather, as we had tried this once before and the weather got in the way – maybe second time lucky.