Day 151, 152 - Greymouth to Westport to Hanmer Springs, South Island - Thursday 15th, Friday 16th March 2012

Rain, rain, rain!! Why is it that when we want to walk and see the amazing scenery it rains!! With the weather not being on our side we started our drive to Greymouth. A couple of weeks ago someone put a flyer on the windscreen of our camper advertising an amazing campsite in Greymouth with free WI-FI, hot showers and free food from the local bakery at 4pm every day!! I thought sounds too good to be true but Soph kept the flyer and today we headed for this wonderland in Greymouth. Two hours later we arrived at the oasis of Neptune backpackers and Caravan Park. Well what a sh*thole!! I actually think it's where they filmed the Shinning with Jack Nicolson!! The lady at the reception was really nice and very helpful. She pointed to the only spare space in their car park and informed us that this was our bay for the night; all the others were taken with rusty old cars that didn't look like they had moved in years. Apparently the owner collects vintage cars, looks like he collected old bangers to me?! Anyway this was, without doubt, the weirdest place we have stayed at so far. Apart from the lady on the reception, the other staff were all muted, long haired, bearded blokes who cleaned non-stop - however the place never looked clean! In fact I don't think there were any paying guests apart from us, everyone else worked for their keep. Inside they had a video room and seeing as the weather was so bad we paid $2 to watch The Notebook. The video room was massive, freezing cold, had five sofas (all different and all knackered), a playstation 1 and a leaky fish tank. We picked the green and yellow sofa with brown edges, wrapped up warm and scoffed crisps with the film. Greymouth was really just a stop over town on our way to Hanmer Springs, so with the film done we ate some lamb stew that Soph had cooked, and headed to bed!

The next day I thanked god that I wasn't murdered in the night by a member of staff and headed for the showers. Into the freezing building I walked, past the bearded guy who was still cleaning, and up the wet wooded stairs to shower room A. Inside there were 3 towels all wet and dripping all over the floor but the shower inside was dry and looked like it had not been used for days - weird! The shower was tepid but ok. Dry and clean we jumped in the camper van, waved goodbye to the weirdo's and headed off. The drive from Greymouth to Westport is supposed to be one of the top ten coastal drives in the world. It was amazing but cloudy and raining which was a shame; because of this we actually ended up driving all day, onwards to Hanmer springs ,where we had a walk around town then headed to a rest area to further on towards Kaikoura to freedom camp. Freedom camping is just when you camp outside of a camp site / layby and its free - hence the name! We found one just outside Kaikoura; it was on the left hand side so I pulled over and the road went back on itself and under a bridge to the other side and here was a dead end with a bench and bins - perfect. As it was now dark and we were pretty tired we chilled and sorted out our next day in Kaikoura and what we would do, over some soup and bread. We drew the curtains and just as we did a blue pickup truck pulled in and parked right behind us. Very strange I thought; then he revved his engine and flashed his lights. Ok by this point I was a tad concerned! Then he drove slowly past twice and off into the distance… I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, maybe it was the bearded guys from the weird campsite in Greymouth. It wasn't, but we weren't going to wait and see; I jumped in the front and headed to the next layby, here we felt safe and slept well!