West Coast - NZ

On Saturday after our very nice train journey and after checking into the hotel in Greymouth and eating lunch we drove north a bit to what is called Pancake Rocks. If the tide is high and the surf is high there would be interesting water splashes through the blow holes but those conditions weren't true. It was still pretty nice. I did see a small brown bird in the bushes that could have been a Kiwi - except they don't come out during the day so it probably was a Kewa which is also brown, flightless, but is larger and has a shorter beak. Later when I saw several Kewas I wasn't sure about the ID because the Kewa is quite a bit larger than what I think I did see.

The rock on the right looks quite a bit like a lion.

On friday we drove south to the Franz Joseph and Fox Glaciers. It is interesting that in this quite temperate climate that is semi-tropical several hundred miles north that these glaciers flow off Mount Cook and come down pretty close to sea level. We got pretty close to them by walking down the walks. At Franz-Joseph there were some guided groups that were climbing on the glacier, but we elected to not do that. Still, all in all that day we walked for 3-4 hours in addition to the slightly greater than 400 KM drive.
( a couple of glacier views )