Dead Possums and Pancake Rocks

We had a nice early start from Franz Josef and a long day of travel ahead of us – almost ten hours on the road! Although, as mentioned before, the bus rides were not so bad as the drivers tended to treat it as more of a tour than a bus ride so we had plenty of commentary on our way towards Nelson where we’d be spending our penultimate night in New Zealand.

We drove North through the Glacier National Park and after an hour and a half or so we stopped at a place called “Bushman’s Café”, an interesting place that had a ten foot model of a fly on its front wall. This was one of our lunch stops so Nic and I had some lunch before walking into the café (we made sandwiches for the journey). Inside everything was a bit…creepy, and…stuffed. Almost everything was made out of something that had once lived (and I don’t include trees in that by the way). The chairs were made of antlers and on top were cushions of fur. Almost all of the souvenirs were possum related i.e. possum fur hat, possum fur gloves, dead stuffed possum and so on. The bushman who owned the café seemed to have reluctantly entered the business world as all his signs were written by a bitter hand towards tourists and, well, everyone who didn’t kill possums. In New Zealand they have a problem with possums, and you can get a job as a possum hunter if you are so inclined. Although, from the evidence of the Bushman’s Café I’d say such a profession would have a markedly negative impact on your sanity. There was a museum at the back of the café which I can only assume was a macabre sideshow filled with a multitude of skeletons and badly stuffed animals, quite the setting for a low budget horror movie which neither Nicola nor I wanted to be part of. 


After leaving the Bushman’s Café behind us we continued on our journey until a few hours later we reached a place called Punakaiki; home to the Pancake Rocks. We had considered staying in Punakaiki when we were planning our journey around New Zealand but we were glad we didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, the pancake rocks were quite a sight but we managed to see it all within the 20 minute break we had on the bus. With the precious little time we had in New Zealand I think Nicola and I would have been disappointed had we stopped for the night. The path to the pancake rocks takes you through what looks like some sort of corn fields (although they’re not actually corn it just looks like that sort of flora). As you head towards the sea you get an image of a series of rocks, flattened at the heads and seamed with a number of eroded lines throughout. They were pretty interesting looking, and the area was nice and certainly a nice stop off on our bus journey, but not worth staying a night unless you were in New Zealand for a few weeks and had some time to kill.

After getting back on the coach we travelled on to Nelson, a large port town, where we would spend our final nights in a hostel (which we were relieved at the thought of) before heading on to Wellington and finally Auckland (which would be another mammoth day of travel ahead of us).