Day 7 and 8 - West Coast of South Island

The west coast is wet, it has rained and rained and then it rained some more. I guess that is what is going to happen in a area of the the planet that gets upwards of 7 metres of rain a year. Yes you read that correctly, the west coast of New Zealand is one of the wettest places on earth and it can get upwards of 7m of rain a year!!! When you try and camp it sucks. I have conceded that we are just plain idiots sometimes.

So after we left the Abel Tasmen National Park we headed through the Buller gorge to Westport, NZ. Nothing crazy to report from this day, just a lot of rain forest, a cool gorge and we even stopped to look at a earthquake epicenter. It wasn't what it was cracked up to be. We camped in Westport on the coast and got clobbered by a rainstorm, or at least we thought we got clobbered, then the locals said oh yah, "that was a sprinkle last night". I was obviously misinformed.

The next morning we awoke, broke down camp and got the hell out of that freezing ass town and headed south down the coastal highway and got on a train. This train led up us a valley, through some super dense rain forest, that was soaking up every bit of the heaven water coming down, to a wall of limestone. We were in the heart of karst topography.

You see we had signed up for some cave rafting. This was our day to explore the spooky world of underground exploration. Up the hill we walked and into a giant cave, filled with stalactites and stalagmites, wetas, 40 year old foot prints and god knows what the hell else. For 2.5 hours we got informed about the formations and history of the area. We were even told that we were quite safe in the caves if an earthquake hit, I called bullshit when I saw the giant ass rocks on the cave floor that were obviously from the ceiling. Nonetheless we trudge on in wet suits carrying tire tubes.

Why the tubes and wet suits? They were for the underground rafting that was done on the second part of the tour. You see because this is NZ, you can't just show people a cave, you must present a extreme element to it, in this case toobin'. So that is what we did, we jumped on a tube and got in a river that flowed gently through the caves. At this point we shut out our headlamps, leaned back and scoped out the glowworms lining the roof of the tunnels. Like a starry night to look up these worms marked the ceiling leading to our exit. These worms are not comparable to anything else, just a really neat thing to see.

Upon exit of the caves, it was raining, and it stayed that way all the way to Hokitika, were we got a room for the night.