Day 13 – Fox Glazier to Westport

Friday, Jan 29, 2016

Happy Birthday Cheryl!

We got up very early in order to get to Lake Matheson and take sunrise pictures. We arrived at the lake by 6:20 am, 15 minutes before sunrise, however, there was no sunrise. It was a drizzly, overcast, foggy day. However we were able to get several nice pictures of the trees and vegetation around the lake with their reflection on the water.

We stopped for breakfast at the fancy cafe located at the entrance to Lake Matheson and I had a latte and a breakfast, bacon & egg pie. I was quite impressed at the design in the latte.

We returned to camp, completed some chores, packed up our camper van and left Fox Glazier for some unknown destination in the north. We retraced our drive on the hairpin turns through the mountains past Franz Joseph Glazier and continued north.

We drove to Ross, where I had been asked to drop off a gift. We arrived at noon, had lunch and then drove to the shop of Steve Maintland, where I presented him with a Terry Fox T-Shirt that Les Potapczyk had given me. Steve is a superb athlete as well as a Jade carver.

He informed us about Jade and how it is polished and the fact that most store-bought jade is sprayed with lacquer, synthetic (i.e. plastic ) or synthetically enhanced to make it shiny and green. He showed showed us how some tricks to tell whether a stone is fake, although he has found some plastic imitations that are excellent replicas. We bought these 2 stones from him before we left to continue our journey.

We drove to Hokitika and stopped there to book our ferry ride to the north island. We soon found out that there was a famous bike rally there this weekend called the ” Woodstock Motorcycle Rally ” because bikers were showing up from everywhere.

We had a short walk along the beach where they were having a contest to see who could create the best or funniest design with the driftwood on shore. There were definitely some unique designs.

We decided to continue our trek north and had wonderful views of the coastline along the way.

When we arrived in Punakaiki, we stopped to view the ” Pancake Rocks “.

One section was quite fascinating. Can you see the characters in the rocks?

We left Panakaiki and continued north until we arrived in Westport at 9 pm. We secured a camp site and quickly drove to Cape Foulwind to see if we could capture the sunset, but it was too cloudy to see a nice sunset, however, we saw a local bird called the Weka before it got too dark to see anything.