At 4am this morning we were awoken by a 'cock-a-doodle-doo' or two from the site's resident cockerel! Unimpressed, we managed to go back to sleep for a few hours. We got up at a more sensible hour, and hit the road in the rain. We were heading towards Nelson today, and had planned to stay at another DOC site, but when we looked into, we found there weren't any on the way, the only ones were quite out of the way. Since we weren't planning on spending much else th...

This morning we decided to head back to a café we'd visited a couple of days before for breakfast - last time we only used the internet there but the food looked rally good! We ordered scrambled eggs on toast and read all about the Abs victory in the paper while we were eating. It's been a fantastic tournament and we've both got into it much more than we thought we would! It's been good to meet people from all over the world as we've been travelling around and t...

We woke up to the sound of motorbikes this morning - today was the annual Greymouth motorcycle street racing event, and most of the town centre was sealed off. There were a lot of bikers in town for the event, but we (just like the rugby) just happened to be there! Our brewery tour wasn't until 2:30pm, so we had a bit of a lie-in and left the hostel at about 11:30. We walked to one of the entry points and paid our $5 entry fee (apparently this is a good price to...

We're still heading up the West Coast and today we arrived in Greymouth. Our morning stop was a place called Shantytown Heritage Park - a recreation of a gold mining town from the 1850s. We thought it was a bit like Beamish on a smaller scale! We rode on the restored steam train and got off at the sawmill, which was in full operation and had a display attached detailing the stories of the people who'd suffered nasty (often fatal) accidents in the saws - welcome t...

We decided to have a quiet day today to try and save some of our precious funds! We'd pretty much seen all there was of Hokitika yesterday so our plan was drive to a DOC site and spent the day lazing about in the van. However, the first site we went to, which was on the site of and old gold mining town and looked very interesting, was closed for another week! The summer season's not quite here yet… So we had to revert to Plan B and drive back through Hokitika...