Greymouth

The journey to Greymouth was pretty good. Our first stop was at a Seal Colony where we stretched our legs.


Next we stopped in the Paparoa National Park on a nice walk down to the beach on the Truman track.



Our final stop of the day was at Punakaiki where we saw the Pancake rocks - there were blowholes there too but the tide was in the wrong position for us to see them.



In Greymouth we stayed in a hostel called the Noah's Ark. Each room had a different animal theme - I stayed in the tiger room - there was a toy tiger in the fireplace. At some point the tiger was kidnapped and was shortly replaced by a penguin - pointing the finger at the girls in the Penguin room.

I only stayed at Greymouth one night as there was not much going on. Practically the whole bus did the Monteith’s brewery tour. We had a look around the brewery then got to try all the different beers:

> Black Beer
> Celtic Beer
> Golden Lager
> Original Ale
> Pilsner Beer
> Radler Bier
> Winter Ale

We also got to try a special beer that didn't have a name yet but was being entered into a competition. At the end of the tasting we all got to pull our own beers for about 15 minutes before heading off to a BBQ organised by the brewery. It was an all you could eat sausage BBQ - aparently the record of 37 was held by a Maori guy. I managed 6 and was full. As part of the deal we also got a Mega Pint free (a bit bigger than a UK pint). We held onto the glass for the night and paid the same price for mega pints as everyone else was paying for handles.

We headed for the glaciers next morning.