Over the rainbow...

Sunset in Greymouth

The gemstone beach

Picnicking in Charleston

Views of the west coast

More west coast

Blowholes at Pancake Rocks

Pancake Rocks

Goofin' at the beach

Don't look down

Walk across Buller Canyon

The gods help me, the Wizard of Oz has been the soundtrack to our NZ experience. This is the kids" favourite music at the moment (especially Ren). Now, I can't argue that it doesn't somehow match the landscape. The wildness of this country can indeed make you feel like you're gone over the rainbow into some other world, but if I hear Judy Garland sing that song one more time, I may also be tempted to call on the flying monkeys to .

Today, we swung up the West Coast. To borrow an analogy I used earlier, if the north coast of this country is the friendly farm girl - all sweetness and warmth - the west coast is the tattooed sailor - swearing a blue streak and just daring you to piss him off. The coastline here is rugged with crashing surf, dramatic drops into the void of a swirling ocean and rocky beaches. All of which gets negotiated via a knife edge road that is chiselled out of limestone hills rising out of the sea. In some places, it even is down to one lane (often over bridges) and you have to make sure there is no on-coming traffic before you proceed.

Since it was a long day's drive and we left early so we could make it to the Pancake Rocks at high tide, we built in a few stops along the way. Mid-morning, we stopped at the Buller Gorge Swingbridge. The bridge spans a milky river gorge at the site of an old gold mining encampment. The kids tore across that thing without an inch of fear. Never mind that it was swing a couple hundred feet above a fast moving river - Ren led the way with aplomb all the while choo-chooing as he said the bridge was tracks and he was a big train.

We also stopped at the tiny three building town of Charleston, which had a lovely little cove where we spread out our picnic blanket for lunch. Apparently, the cove is home to the notoriously shy little blue penguins, and while we saw no evidence of any, it was kind of fun to be sitting somewhere that is, in point of fact, a penguin residence. Kiyomi hunted in vain.

The west coast is supposed to have some of the worst weather, but we lucked out today and had great weather. This made the Pancake Rocks alot more enjoyable than we were expecting. Everyone else we've met here who had travelled along this coast experienced some pretty foul weather (not such a surprise from a place that actually has a Foulwind Point). The Pancake Rocks are striated towers of stone that rise out of the water and shore line - effectively looking like stacked pancakes. As this formation butts up against the sea, at high tide there are also some pretty impressive blowholes. The whole area is touristed up - with walkways, signage and guardrails. Given we arrived in a campervan, we fit right in. It must have been a pretty impressive site before it was tourified though, especially viewed from the rocks above. I couldn't help and thinking about backpacking trips in the pre-kid era, where I would come to places like this and scoff at the people miling. What goes around, comes around I suppose. This time, it was my kids tearing around the walkways and looking for rainbows in the splashbacks.

Our day ended in Greymouth, the largest town on the west coast at a rather lovely campground on a very cool beachcombing beach. Rather than sand, alot of the beaches we're experiencing here are rocky, which is great when you have a rock hound for a daughter. This particular area is known for its gemstones and so the kids happily hunted up and down the beach for gems (I confess, I don't have any idea what makes a gemstone, and so the collection we hauled off the beach are basically just a bunch of pretty rocks which I am calling gems). I'm going to be fascinated to see the expression on the border officer when he/she asks us if we have something to declare and I say "rocks, lots and lots of rocks!"

Things we've learned today: blue penguins are notoriously shy and generally only come out at dusk and dawn; in the mid- to late- 1800s, there was a gold rush along the west coast, with small prospector towns popping up everywhere; the Buller River Gorge was the epicenter of a massive earthquake in the mid-1980s, where the plates underneath actually shifted.