Well....Greymouth....umm....at the mouth of the river Grey.....uuuummm...thats it!

No only kidding theres more there but our time in Greymouth was very limited after our Tranzalpine train from Christchurch ran over an hour and a half late. This meant we only spent one evening there rather than an afternoon and an evening. By the way the Tranzalpine train is a really nice scenic train route that goes from Christchurch to Greymouth across the Canterbury plains, through the gorgeous Southern Alps and through the rainforest on the west coast. Its a great trip and many people just take a day trip to Greymouth and back solely for the scenery. We were told that its very wet on the west coast as the warm air from Oz hits the Alps and rains down on the west. It certainly was wet. As soon as we came through the Otira tunnel the sun had gone and the rain was pouring, for the rest of the way and all night in Greymouth. The obvious and best thing to do was to take the Monteiths Brewery tour. This involved a quick tour of the plant follwed by the all important sampling....of each beer. For the final half hour we were unleashed on the pumps ourselves. This wasn't so bad for the brewery as we only had half pint glasses and we all seemed to be filling them with half a glass of froth anyway.

The other good part of the tour was the pub BBQ that followed. Here we met some other guys and gals travelling on the Magic Bus route whom we regurarly met with on various parts of the journey throughout the trip.

So the rain poured and so did we...thats it! Turned out to be a good stopover.