damn, that electric warmer really did the trick. i had a wonderfully warm sleep. very nice. can i take it with me?

we went to cape fowlwind. funny, this whole time i was thinking it was spelled 'foulwind'. there's a seal colony. i thought maybe their stench was bad and hence it was 'foulwind'. nope, there's birds around. i guess that's why it's 'fowlwind'. we did the cape fowlwind walk and wondered what the fuck where we doing this for. it was just ok. then towards the end was the seal colony. pretty cool to look down at them. i could see some of them were tagged. also towards the end of our walk, a weka crossed our path. woh. fowl-wind. a weka is like a diurnal kiwi. i didn't have time to reach into my pockets for my cameras. a little bit later by the parking lot though, there were a few more and i did manage to take a snapshot! cool.

spider nest of eggs

wall island behind me

seal colony

weka

the next place we stopped at was punakaiki for lunch and to view the pancake rocks and blowholes. twiddle thumbs and i spent so long having lunch that we didn't really have time to view the rocks. so i asked the bus driver if i had time, not really, only 5 minutes, but he said he can't leave without me. so i sorta ran over there, looked at things quickly (tide too low for blowhole action), and sorta ran back. i thought i saw some kiwi bus people still looking at the rocks when i left so i thought i was ok. i got on the bus and turns out i was the last one. the driver started to leave when someone noticed 2 people were still missing. we waited about 5 more minutes for them. whew! i wasn't the last one!

pancake rocks

blowhole

we stopped for 1 hour in greymouth. pretty boring looking town but 1 shop had some really cool maori style necklaces made from a black stone. not sure what stone. so far we've only seen jade and cow bone. very nice and expensive. this is the town that the tranzalpine goes to or leaves from, depending on where you board. when i live in christchurch i guess i will be doing the same day return. i really didn't see anything to do there. spent time in the library on the internet. had to pay bills back in america but something odd with the storage facility site i use. i hope i can pay and they don't put my shit in the street. that would be something wouldn't it? homeless. jobless. and stuffless.

drove through hokitika (jade country) and made it to mahinapua, about 6km away. there is nothing here. just this lake mahinapua hotel. this is one of the worst places we've stayed at because the rooms are not real buildings. it's really cold. the bathroom facilities are...like a prison and i should know now after napier, hehehehe. the kitchen is probably one of the best parts about it but it could use improvement. the main part is a bar with a fireplace. i spent some time on the crappy internet terminals (they same to have this same style terminal all over the south island) de-spamming the blog again. i swear spam is a pain in the ass. so many comment spams. fucking ridiculous. i even use blacklist to help keep it down but each time i go on the road for a few days without checking, i find a huge pile of spam crap.