Punakaiki, now much here eh

Punakaiki, now much here eh? The first day I checked in to my hostel with an awesome beachfront, but not that you would want to swim at this rough beach. Massive rips, big rocks and thrashing waves! Anyway it was off to see Pancake rocks, as this is kind of the only attraction here. They were bigger than I thought, I saw the blowhole at its best during high tide. Then it was off back to the hostel where I booked a horse trek for next day.

My horses name was 'Appy', wasn't a very big horse as you can see from the photos, but he did the job. At first I was a little scared cause they were running through the instructions really quick, especially 'what to do if you horse bolts!'. But it was all okay once we got on the track, although some of the horses including mine had rivalries about who was to be in front of each other. Occasionally I kicked my horse to take off which would cause the horse in front to be like 'your not overtaking me' which made him run and the rider had no idea why the horse had bolted, ahh it was pretty funny! We made across a few river crossings through a massive limestone gorge to stop and have morning tea. We eventually headed back and had a stroll along the beach, then back to the stables.

After saying goodbye to Appy I went into town and had a well deserved lunch then decided to go visit a local artist who makes glass bead jewellery (because I saw some of her work on display in the main street gallery) Her shop was kind of disappointing, so I left after a while and went along a walk called the Trueman track, it took me to this lovely little cove. It was all blocked off by shear cliffs. Again the waves were very aggressive but it was quite nice overall. I then walked along the beach back to my hostel to watch the sunset.

The next morning I went on a walk along the Punakaiki river, another limestone gorge. Some of the walkway you had to squeeze under big fallen rocks, you could also see others that had almost dammed the river completely. Then it was off to Murchison about midday.