Points West

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The drive from east to west coast inevitably involves crossing the Southern Alps. I was taking the Lewis Pass which is one of the easier ones and was completely free of snow. It also meant that I passed close to a couple of thermal springs. These are more common on the North Island, but I've never been to one so decided to stop here, at the Maruia resort:

They have a selection of different ways of experiencing the hot water, but I opted for the basic rock pool and Japanese bathhouse deal.

The rock pools are artificial but quite well done:

The different pools were at different temperatures; none was too hot to be comfortable though. The Japanese bathhouse was really just a large pool where you could swim about a bit in the hot water. Everything smelt strongly of sulphur and I could smell it for the rest of the day.

It was unusual to be lying in a pool of hot water, outdoors and looking up at a snow-capped mountain, but not unpleasant.

But then it was time to press on. My destination was Westport on the north-west coast of the island. This is the thinly disguised setting for a long series of stories I've been reading on the internet. A guy who calls himself Kiwi (real name, David) has created the tales starting from the founding of the town (which he calls Westpoint) right through the present day and into the future. I love the stories and it seemed as good an excuse as any to base myself there for a day or so.

When I presented myself at the i-Site, the lady was very helpful and told me where I could refill the van with water (and dump the used stuff) and even where the “tolerated” place was for free camping – right by the beach!

Westport is an old coal-mining town though there's no mining there now. Coal still occasionally comes through the harbour at Westport but even that is unusual – most goes by rail to Lyttelton on the east coast for shipping.

The town museum is still called Coaltown, but the exhibits are by no means confined to coal mining. In fact there sometimes seemed to be no obvious connection to the town or to mining – as if the owner just came across something and stuck it in the collection.

The nearby township of Denniston grew up around the coal mine of the same name, and died when the mine was closed. Little is left of it, apparently, but a few crumbling buildings. If and when I come back to New Zealand, I think it might be interesting to visit. In its heyday, though, miners worked round the clock producing coal. From the mine, it was sent down to the mainline railway on an inclined track that operated mainly under gravity – two coal cars were linked and the heavy, full one pulled the empty one up as it rolled down. The museum has one of the original coal trucks mounted on a short section of track:

The track is angled to match the steepest point of the Denniston incline, which was actually greater than 45º. There was a video playing in the museum which told some of the miners' stories and some of them included the horrific consequences of accidents on the coal incline.

Just round the coast from Westport is Cape Foulwind. Captain Cook named it that when he ran into some particularly nasty weather. Well, when I was there, it was almost perfectly calm and a beautiful evening as well. Just as at Kaikoura, there is a large colony of New Zealand Fur Seals here. These ones were much greater in number, but also further away from anywhere you could see them from, but I reckon there are at least 20 seals in this picture:

There may be more – they're quite hard to spot amongst the driftwood.

The sun was setting over the Tasman Sea as I was leaving the seal colony: