Si's Year Out! (Plus Europe! Plus Morocco!): The West Coast

We next headed West to Greymouth, stopping half way to walk across the biggest swing bridge in NZ at Buller Gorge. On the other side was a fairly small island that had been the site of a large gold mine and had lots of old gold digging machines rusting away. I decided that walking back across the 110m bridge would be far too boring so decided to zip across via the 'comet line', a 160m zip line from one side to the other, superman style! It was a rush and a half flying 50m over the roaring river to the other side!

Just before Greymouth was 'On Yer Bike', an unusual mix of quadbike center and model village. As we were waiting for our quadbike session to start we walked around the model village. It was a recreation of an old gold mining town. When gold was discovered the town thrived but once all the gold near the surface was mined the town became deserted. Apparently they got about $6,000,000,000 worth of gold out, which went back to England, and they reckon there is much more than that left down there (but too far down to be mined easily). Our quadbiking experience was an hour through some pretty muddy tracks into the forest on some very powerful bikes! After getting very wet and muddy we were told that we'd now be going on the 'muddy track'!!!

On the road down the West coast from Greymouth we stopped off to see 'Pancake Rocks', an area where the rocks have developed to look like huge stacks of big fat pancakes stacked on top of each other.