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| 17 mile, on the west coast |
delicious peaches, nasty tomatoes (though Janna thinks they're pretty great), and an as-yet-unsampled watermelon, Janna, Daniel, Tuck, and myself hit the road. (For all of you doing a double take, no, we did not pick up any new travel buddies along with the fruit. Tuck is the car. Daniel is the British voice we have set on the GPS :p ). I am currently being annoyed my an invisible mosquito.
It was a fairly long drive from Motueka to our next destination - the pancake rocks (not for eating)! The road was (as usual) windy most of the way, but we passed some gorgeous river scenery. Of a river. In a gorge. Ha. Haha. Okay, but in all seriousness, it was very pretty :p .
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| The mud layer has all washed away, leaving stacked layers of limestone |
The pancake rocks are some rather unusual limestone formations along the west coast. The limestone parts formed the usual way approximately 35 million years ago, with the exoskeletons of oceanic organisms falling to the sea floor and condensing under enormous pressure. For "reasons not entirely understood", these particular beds of limestone are layered with softer mud/silt sediment. When the plate movement which is currently raising the Southern Alps pushed these limestone beds above sea level (~5 million years ago), the pounding of the waves, rain, and wind began eroding the rock into its current bizarre formations. The mud layers eroded at a much quicker rate than the limestone, resulting in the pancake-like stacks of rock we see today.  |
| The Pancake Rocks |
There were some incredible shapes in the rocks - lots of towers, but also huge limestone arches on a truly grand scale, leading to tumultuous surf-filled pools surrounded full-circle by stone at the top. At high tide this results in an assortment of blow holes spewing water high up into the sky (or so the pictures tell me - we missed high tide by several hours :p ).
To continue on the theme of amusing road signs, I'll include a couple of good ones from today... penguins and a warning to cyclists about riding over rails.
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| Caution, penguins next 5 km |
Eventually we drove down to the little town of Hokitika - and the last grocery store for 500 and something km! Speaking of grocery stores... well, lets just say that the grocery store here hasn't quite figured out their automatic checkouts. We were headed for the normal tills when a girl who worked there stepped out and asked if we could us the
self-checkout, instead. Okay, sure. I use them all the time back in Vancouver. Why not. However, the machine ate our cash then wouldn't dispense the change, and no less than 6 employees (two of whom were managers) milled around for a good 15 minutes before deciding that they didn't know how to fix it and ringing us through a regular till. Grocery trip extended three fold... Also Janna was very excited to make herself an omelet for breakfast tomorrow, but we forgot to buy eggs. Oops. Also also, Janna bought a jug of (alcoholic) cider, and I had a bit and can honestly say its not half bad (what is the world coming to???)Back at the camp site, a Boy Scout sold us a chocolate bar. Clever of him - so many potential customers in so little space... it was a tasty chocolate bar, and didn't last very long. Which was a pity, because we were supposed to be using it as a bribe to make me send some much-needed emails to the outside world sorting out my situation with graduate school this upcoming semester. (Brief update for those I haven't seen in a while... original plan of UVic has been morphing into the graduate program at UW in Seattle (or Univ. Colorado, Boulder, but its looking like Seattle)). But eventually the emails were sent, even without any chocolate left with which to bribe me.
There is a really large spider behind my bed and while spiders don't normally bother me I don't really want a giant one crawling on my face while I'm sleeping. If I hadn't seen it on the wall a little while ago I would be blissfully ignorant... I wonder if it likes mosquitoes... maybe I can lure it out if I catch the mosquito that's been buzzing around my head for the past little while. Who am I kidding, I'm just going to bed :p
Watch out for spiders,
Marysa
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