New Zealand Index

Auckland
Northland
Heading South
Wellington
Traveling again
West Coast
Picking Apples
Road to Qtown
Kinloch
Southland
Queenstown
Heading North
Queen Charlette Wilderness Park
to Taranaki
Central Plateau
The End

So I arrive in Dunollie, ready to chill for a while. Immediatly I was put to work fixing bikes. They had flats, so I just repaired them. When I arrived there was a French couple Dutch guy and German girl, Anne, working there, but the French couple and Dutch guy were leaving the next day. Then three Canadian girls came. So this is how it started. I started tending bar the next morning. Only a few locals came in. not a bad way to spend the morning. This was going to be alright. Then Anne left the following Tuesday. That kinda sucked, for She was fun and the Canadian girls were not. Not that they were all bad, but having them as my only companions was kinda boring. But I hung out with them anyway, and tried to get away by myself as well. I tried hiking to the waterfall the was close by, but ended up getting lost. I also went down to the beach on the bikes. Also in this time I was starting to get to know the local drinkers, and the were an interesting bunch. Dunnollie is a mining town, so all these guys are coal miners. Really a different breed of person. Also in the beginning I was getting to know the owner of the hostel, a guy from San Diego, who had run hostels all over the US, and had married a kiwi chick, and was living here. He always had some interesting stories, and made some of the more boring shifts I had more fun. So this takes me through my first week of work, and then I had a day off. I decided to take this opportunity to drive up the Lewis pass, and go to mariana springs, a place with hot springs. This was a really nice drive, and I had found something on my map, a ghost town just off the road that I was going t stop at. But as drove up I didn’t see it. So I arrived at the springs, and there were two parts, a outdoor hot springs in rock pools, and a Japanese bathhouse. So I went to the bathhouse, for I had never been to one. It was very nice, and I spent a almost two hours there, and then I ran out of time, so I never went to the rock pools. Now it was time to head back, and the weather had taken a turn for the worse. Pissing down rain, but oh well, I was in a car. On the way back I did find the ghost town, and I wish it wasn’t raining, it would have been better to explore on foot, but it was still neat. The rest of the trip back was uneventful, and when I got back I found out the Greymouth had a hurricane that day, went right through the center of town. I checked it out a couple of days later, and there was some real damage. Kinda crazy. So I had one day back on, and then another day off. On this next day off I went up to Paparoa National Park, which was about half an hour away. The main attraction here was pancake rocks and blowholes. They were cool, but didn’t really live up to the hype, I thought. After this, I did a nice 3-hour trek up one valley, down another. That was great, amazing place. Then back to the hostel. The day of so were uneventful, though I was getting to know some of the locals better, but then on Tuesday or Wednesday evening, we had a new influx of workers. These last four days or so were a lot of fun. I had a good connection with them, and we had good times. So of course, these days also seamed to pass very fast. I did a few more hikes, and found so glowworms, and before I knew it, it was my last night. I wanted to stay, and my new friends wanted me to stay, but I was feeling that I needed to move on and make some money, and that the apples were calling me. So we had a nice BBQ and then stayed up late around a fire pit, and it was a great way to end my time there, I look back on it fondly.