West Coast South Island
Sorry everyone, I have been meaning to update my blog for sooooooo long, I had this slavedriver for a boss and she was making me work crazy, CRAZY hours. I didn’t get to my bed till 6am some nights, she’s a nightmare… tell you about that at a later date though!
So, back to New Zealand and the West Coast….
We arrived at Lake Mahinapua late afternoon, and with not a lot to do there before our fancy dress party, we headed off to the beach with a few bottles of vino. We headed back for dinner, which was prepared for us by the hotel owner, the lovely Les and our bus driver, Dodgy. We had a huge backpacker’s feast for only 10 bucks, with steak, potatoes, pasta, bread, veg, it was amazing! After dinner we changed into our costumes. The theme of our fancy dress party was ‘The Sea’, which was soooo difficult to do! I had decided to dress up as a Mermaid, which went terribly wrong. As a tail I had decided to wrap tin foil around my legs, with the help of my dorm buddies Roxan & Paul. Roxan did an absolutely fantastic job in making my tail. Unfortunately I could hardly move. I had to do a funny jump thing to walk, getting down stairs was impossible and I could not even sit down. So my costume stayed on for approximately half an hour before changing into normal clothes. We sat around playing cards, drinking beer and listening to possibly the worse jukebox ever! By 1am everyone was drifting off to bed. Then someone suggested going out to the Lake (as we hadn’t actually seen it yet and it was meant to be stunning), so 4 of us decided to talk a 10 minute walk in the pitch black to try to find the lake. It was bloody terrifying!! You couldn’t see a thing in front of you!
The next morning we set off for Franz Josef, where we were spending 2 nights. We stopped of for a quick walk to see the Glacier from afar. What was supposed to be a quick 20 minute walk and back actually turned into an hour for Matt & I, as we kept walking wen we should have turned back. The Kiwi bus left without us, and we had to (rather embarrassingly) hitch a lift from one of the Glacier Hike Tour Guides back to meet the other guys!
That evening after grabbing a bite to eat in the very nice hostel bar, I headed to bed at an early hour with a migraine. The next day we were doing a full day hike of the Glacier so I wanted to be fresh in the morning for the long day ahead of me.
Mhairi's Travel Blog 