It's been a while since the last update. Sorry about that, but I'm not going to take all the blame. As was the case with the last update, I've mainly been staying in areas where there is precious little internet access, and what there is is either too slow or depends on coins being shoved in every ten minutes. I'm in Wellington now, a.k.a. The Big City, so I can actually bring this up to date now... After retracing my steps and heading back up the east coast of the south island, and with Catherine still taking up the passenger seat, we decided to go across the Lewis Pass to the west coast. First stop was a bit of wine tasting and a visit to an olive farm, then an hour or two in Hamner Springs. There are various hot spring pools that can be visited, ranging in temperature and chemical content (the sulphur one was nice on the skin but smelled like rotten eggs). This was less impressive than the traditional Japanese bath-house in the middle of nowhere, which had a few pools outside and a traditional shower. All very well and good, except for the sand-flies which decided to eat my legs. The marks have just about gone now, but I looked like I had a dense case of the measles. Upon reaching Westport I abandoned Catherine, who was going north to Karamea while I went back south again. Driving down the west coast meant I could stop to see the Pancake Rocks, which are limestone rocks in thousands of layers which look like piles of pancakes (hence the name, funnily enough). I was there a couple of hours before high tide, but still saw some of the blowholes - when the waves come crashing in to the channels, they come spraying out of holes and all over the rocks. The biggest (and coldest) things on the west coast are the Fox Glacier and Franz Josef Glacier. I had a walk up to the Fox Glacier, which is the poor relation - it's still spectacular, but it's just over 20km from the more impressive Franz Josef Glacier. While at Franz Josef, I managed to do a heli-hike. This involved being flown to just below the neve (the part of the glacier which is forming new ice) and walking around for a couple of hours before being picked up again. There were plenty of crevasses to jump over and narrow chasms to squeeze through, and we were treated to the sight of a couple of hunks of ice crashing down the slopes about 800 metres from us. One of the two children in our group asked our leader, Roar (he's Danish, he's allowed to have a stupid name) if he'd ever seen a really big piece of ice fall. Roar patiently replied that the ones we just saw were probably twice the size of a double-decker bus. The ice disguised many streams and pools, all of a breathtaking blue and white colour. I managed not to stand in any of them, even if most of the other people in my group did. Apparently they were a bit chilly. Once I had satisfied the desire to walk across a giant ice cube, I took the road back up north. I met up with Catherine again in Karamea, where she had been trying to go on a walk in the Oamara basin but had been having trouble since they didn't want to do it with too few people. Once I was added to the numbers (along with five other people, they were obviously waiting to do everyone at once) the walk went ahead. The walk involved going into the Honeycomb caves, which are so-called because the tannins in the water make the river brown, and there is a point in the cave where the stagnant water has a latticed honeycomb of white foam covering the golden-looking liquid. There were also some Moa skeletons for us to look at, and we heard about some of the extinct wildlife from the region. Apart from moas, which were gigantic flightless birds (wiped out by humans, naturally) there were also Haast eagles with a 3 metre wingspan. For comparison, golden eagles and the like are struggling to reach 2 metres. These beasties could carry off an adult human without breaking into a sweat. Once their primary food source (moas) was eliminated, and their secondary food source (humans) wasn't co-operating, they died out too. Next stop was the Golden Bay area. After walking along some of Farewell Spit (the most northerly part of the south island) and visiting the Labyrinth Rocks (self-explanatory, although it's run by a slightly creepy man called Dave who has placed plastic beasties everywhere and talks to everyone as if they're six years old) it was time to head towards the ferry at Picton, via Harwood's Hole. Harwood's Hole turned out to be a little bit out of the way. First was an 11km drive up a so-called gravel road, which really consisted mainly of sharp rocks. Then it was a walk through a forest path which gradually became swallowed up by weird-shaped rocks sticking out of the ground. The Hole itself is massive, and there aren't any official viewing platforms or safety measures. You simply have to edge out as far as you like and try not to fall in. Since it has a 50m round entrance which descends 176m into a cave, falling in would not be advised. [I have missed out some details and destinations, but unless you want to read paragraph after paragraph going on about visiting different geological and natural wonders it would get a bit monotonous.] Zooming up to today, I'm now in Wellington. The ferry journey took longer than it should because the weather is atrocious here, winds that just about take the car door off driving rain and hail horizontally into one's face. Just after arriving I got in touch with Steve and Joanne from the Great Indochina Loop, who have each contributed an astonishing amount of hospitality - Joanne made the nicest (and biggest) burger I've ever seen, and Steve took me to The Man Shed. It's a shed (obviously) with various entertainment facilities (fridge, TV, radio, heating, seating) which is used by Steve and his mates as a hidey-hole from the outside world. My words can do neither Joanne's burger nor the Man Shed justice, both simply have to be experienced to be believed. Hopefully I'll be able to keep this updated more often, now I'm in the more populated part of New Zealand. I'm actually getting a mobile signal now, and they've heard of the internet. One last word about the south island. The word is: Whitebait. It's whitebait season. Strangers will ask what you think of the whitebait, and be unable to talk about anything else. This even happened to me in a urinal. "What d'you make of the whitebait?" Bless the Kiwis, they're obsessed with the damn things. I can only imagine that Westport, Karamea and so on become silent for the rest of the year as the locals just stare at each other blankly, bereft of their only conversational topic.