Bad Sausage, Good Pancakes

What’s the opposite of a gibbous moon? I had to look it up. It’s a crescent moon. And what’s the opposite of a New York minute? It’s a New Zealand minute. “How long does it take to walk to town?” I ask. “Oh, only about five minutes.” Twenty minutes later, muscles and lungs in full rebellion, I arrive.

I wasn’t sad to leave our hostel of the last two nights, even though it had a good heater and the bathroom was ensuite. I had to use my own sheet and the covers didn’t seem entirely clean and the mattress was lumpy and sleep came reluctantly. The kitchen smelled of fish balls and the living room was replete with brain-challenged young men.

We were showered and in the car by 8:30, southbound toward Greymouth, which I say “Grey-muth [sorry I can’t do a schwa, Molly] but locals say Grey Mouth, which sounds plain silly to me, but not as silly as green-lipped shellfish; how can something have green lips? How do they even know where their lips are? What do shellfish lips look like? Do they kiss each other on the shellfishy mouth?

I digress. Ginna driving, we wound through the Upper Buller Gorge and took a little sidetrip to the longest suspension footbridge in New Zealand, a privilege which cost us five bucks a head.

On the other side of the river we could see a pretty little twin waterfall.

The bridge was very bouncy, and as Syd noted, it really got to rocking when a person was out there alone, with the wind buffeting it. Perhaps I should have been scared so high above the river, but I wasn’t.

[Editor’s aside: I just overheard a conversation: A Kiwi asking someone where she’s from, to which she replied, “The U.S. You know, the U.S.A.”]

We had a hideous little breakfast in Murchison, a coal mining town. Syd’s meal was downright comical-looking: rectangles of shredded, deep-fried potatoes with a curled, lanced meat stick of some sort. Syd loves to drive, and wrested the wheel from me at the stop. It’s funny: I don’t particularly like to drive. I do it because of my need for self-sufficiency. But because she wants to do it, I want to too. I’m like a kid who has tossed aside a toy, only to cry for it back once someone else takes interest in it.

[Editor’s aside: Syd’s auto-correct just changed “Southern Alps” to “Stuttering Alps.”]

Today was primarily a driving day, the highlight of which was a detour to Punakaiki (pronounced PUN-eh-KAH-ki) Pancake Rocks. They’re limestone, and they’re a geological anomaly: no one knows for sure how they were formed.

There are a bunch of them out in the ocean.

And they’re also well inland.

I’d expected the sight to be sort of eh, but I loved them. They were beautiful and wild and dangerous.

And the best part were the blowholes, which you can only see in action at high tide, which it was. The sound of the ocean pounding into caves and holes in the rock is ferocious: an earth-shaking boom. The water erupts like a geyser, filling the air for hundreds of feet with a fine mist, which sometimes caught a rainbow.

You know how people always name natural formations after Disney characters and kings and stuff? There was a sign that suggested people consider for themselves what the shapes remind them of.

Internet is so expensive at this place: $2.00 for half an hour. I decided to spring for some time to make this post. The young assistant, a man in his twenties from Chile, comped me $2.00 worth. “I want you to have this,” he said sweetly. “But why?” I asked. “Because if you were my mother, or my grandmother, I’d want you to have it.” If only he hadn’t added the grandmother part, I would have adopted him.