It was a weird feeling as we said goodbye to Poppy and Gus to start the long drive north to Seddonville. A few days ago, I posted on the discomfort of having to spend four days in a B&B; a place where you're essentially given a room in someone's house. Whilst I would still say it's not my preferred method of accommodation, Poppy was an incredibly nice host, and we got on very well. She's had an interesting life (trained helicopter pilot and gold miner) and was only too happy to indulge in stories. She was also keen to learn about the time we were having in NZ and often seemed wistfully jealous as we explained how we'd been glacier walking and white water rafting.
So whilst I still wouldn't recommend B&Bing in general, I'd recommend to anyone to stay at the Franz Josef Alpine Lodge.
The plan was to first drive to a place called Shantytown, on the outskirts of Greymouth. I'd expressed an interest in panning for gold (inspired by Poppy's stories) and apparently Shantytown was an old gold mining town and a place where tourists could try their hand at it. It was about a two hour drive, so approximately half way to our ultimate destination. This meant we had plenty of time to kill and could freely wander around and see if there was anything else we could do.
Shantytown was not what I expected; I'd expected a real, working, ex / current, mining town where people lived and went about their daily lives - where there might also have been a small tourist attraction where you rented a pan, got told how to use it and sent to the local river to try your hand at gold panning. Instead, what we got was a frontier-style amusement park. Sure, there were no rides or anything, but it was a pay-to-get-in fully and faithfully recreated gold-mining town from the 1850/1900 period. You were free to wander about the little (unmanned) shops and services that were available at the time, whilst reading the boards and placards explaining what life was like and the history of the Shantytown area / West Coast.
Whilst it wasn't what I expected, I found it quite fascinating, and we stayed well longer than we'd initially planned. There was a steam train that took you for a short ride into the rainforest, where a faithfully rebuilt sawmill gave you a history of the logging in the area. The West Coast was subject to a gold-rush remarkably similar to the Wild West - it was the same period after all - and logging was of top priority in order to create the planks required for housing and mine shafts.
Pics of the steam train:
At the end of the line (deep in the rainforest), we got to get out and examine the steam train in more detail. There were more boards for us to read about early loggers, including a guy who accidentally chopped his toe off with an axe! When a fellow logger offered to go fetch help, he told him not to rush, as he still needed to have lunch! He purportedly then sat down, peeled down his sock, tossed his toe into the rainforest, and calmly ate his lunch whilst help vanished into the distance! Hardy folk indeed!
I also did get to pan for gold, but not in the way I'd expected. In part of the town there was a gold panning station, where you paid to be given a pan with some river-dirt already in it. You were then shown how to clear the dirt and stones from the pan whilst retaining the flakes. I had a few of the tiniest flakes in my pan, which were poured into a small vial for me to keep.
We probably stayed there for about three hours, and could easily have made a full day of it, but our next stop along the way was Punakaiki - or Pancake Rocks - which was a coastal treasure consisting of limestone rocks being battered by crazily heavy waves. The limestone rocks had layered themselves on top of each other to resemble pancakes, and erosion from the forceful waves created 'blowholes' which boomed loudly as the water rushed through them.
Pics of pancake rocks:
Finally, there wasn't anything else we had planned but to drive up to Seddonville, our basecamp for the next two nights while we explored the region where Yo spent her early, early years - Karamea.
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