My efforts at travel blogging are being slightly hampered by troubles with getting photos onto this blog. Since I’d forgotten to charge my camera battery I don’t have any photos from Punakaiki so I may as well just write about it then anyway. I’d link to some pictures someone else took but a strange feature of this computer is that it won’t allow multiple windows open (and I’m stuck using silly Internet Explorer rather than Firefox) so I’d have to log out of WordPress to find a link and then log back in …. so I’ll leave it to you to type Punakaiki (or you could try “pancake rocks”) into your favourite search engine.

Punakaiki is up the West Coast of the South Island, about 50km north of Greymouth. It is famous for the rather strange geological structure known as the pancake rocks. Along the coastal cliffs the eroded rocks reveal a layering structure that does indeed look like pancakes. There is also a blowhole, and all of the usual spectacular sights you get on limestone coasts, though for me the effect was enhanced by the unfamiliar plant life as well.

I stopped off there on the Intercity bus between Greymouth & Nelson. This is a regular bus rather than a tour, but it stops long enough for a 30min walk to see the pancake rocks, which was a pleasant surprise, I had no idea about it beforehand. I’d expected that the scenic part of the journey would be the train to Greymouth, but Punakaiki, plus the coastal road from Greymouth and Westport, and the mountains and gorges from Wesport to Murchison rivalled the sights on the train journey.