There’s No Place Like Home

Having had one of the most blissful sleeps of our lives, it seemed like a tragedy of epic proportions to be leaving our little haven so soon. But such is the life of travelling folk, so leave we did.

We headed onto the Alpine Pacific Triangle road, so named because the route is vaguely triangular and is formed with mountains on two sides and the Pacific Ocean on the other.

And after an hour on the road, in one of those strange quirks of travelling and after four and a half months on the road, we finally reached home!

ROTHERHAM!

It was a complete replica of the Rotherham at home. For example, the school was a carbon copy of the school I went to.

All Saints Parish Church dominated the skyline

The local supermarket was a carbon copy of the Tesco in Rotherham town centre.

We had the Pennines in the distance

And the bars were as lively and interesting as the party town back in the UK.

I popped into the Rotherham Store, hoping to get a receipt for my purchase with the town name on it (might seem completely sad, but it was the first Rotherham outside of the UK that we had ever seen). And even here the similarity continued. For anyone who has seen the League of Gentlemen, the shop owner was a carbon copy of Tubbs. Her eyes followed me as I perused the “precious things” of the shop, and when I spoke to her she almost jumped back in fright! Suffice to say, I got out of there before I could never leave!

Turning our back on our home town doppelganger, we continued along the road and reached the alpine resort of Hamner Springs. It seemed like the kind of place that we wished we could spend more time in; there were nearby ski slopes, a thermal bathing hot pool, and a pie shop which provided us with a very tasty lunch!

But we couldn’t stay; we had a potentially precarious route to drive on to reach our intended destination for the day; Greymouth on the west coast.

We headed off the Alpine Pacific Triangle highway, and headed through the mountains, constantly watching for snow storms that would leave us stranded in the middle of nowhere! The scenery seemed to improve minute by minute, and the road ascended higher and higher with each kilometre that we travelled.

As we started to reach the snow line of the mountains, the clouds started to descend.

Indeed, as we passed onto the highest point of our journey today, Lewis Pass, we actually started to drive through one such cloud!

We pulled up at a nearby rest stop, and had our first experience with snow (and snow balls!) on the trip so far!

Admittedly, it was a tiny amount of snow, it was snow from the side of the road, and was probably full of discarded diesel oil and other roadside detritus, but snow it was all the same! I just need to keep an eye on my hands now for any sign of contamination!

Unfortunately, after leaving Lewis Pass, both the scenery and the weather took a massive turn for the worse. The beautiful mountain scenery became replaced with farmland and dead-end one street towns and the pleasant weather turned to heavy rain.

We couldn’t even see any hills in the distance, the heavy clouds completely obscuring them.

It was, without a doubt, an absolutely tedious couple of hours journey. Perhaps summed up by the only interesting item being a river called Stinky Creek. It was that boring!

Then, as all hope was being lost, we pulled into a rest stop just outside a place called Stillwater, and found a train!

It was all alone and abandoned and just sitting there!

Now I grew up with trains. My parents, in a move that to this day I’m convinced was just to be evil to me and my brother, never took a driving test until their thirties. Which meant that we seemed to travel everywhere on trains. We even had Intercity Young Rail Club membership, such was the cruelty they inflicted on us (although we did get free stuff through the post so maybe it wasn’t that bad!). So faced with a train stood all by itself, I just had to get on it!

It was probably illegal to do so. It was certainly an effort to climb on board in the driving rain. But I did it all the same. And I’d like to put on record that, if I did in fact break the law by doing it, then it was all my parents fault! My inherent childish desire to climb on things never entered the equation!

Saying goodbye to the Choo-choo, we continued west and finally arrived in Greymouth. We found the road with all the motels on, and started the process again of trying to decide which one to go into.

Which brings us nicely to my next rant. You have a street full of motels. All the motels are practically empty. Almost all are owner managed. So why, when we tried a few of them for prices, did they try to either rip us off or be so rude that we wouldn’t have stayed in their motel if it was the last place on earth?

The first one we tried quoted NZ$90 to us. Now this was a reasonable price for this town, being the cheapest our accommodation book had indicated. And we would have been happy to go with it, were it not for the fact that we had a 10% discount voucher for that particular chain of motels which the owner would not honour. He trotted out some byzantine logic about why he couldn’t go down to NZ$81 for the room, all of which was just complete crap. So, for the sake of NZ$9 (around £3.80) he lost our custom straight away. And the worst thing was, he could have claimed the NZ$9 straight back from the hotel chain, so he wouldn’t even have been out of pocket!

After trying a couple of other motels, all of who were either rude and arrogant or wanted us to get another mortgage for the privilege of staying in their all so unique premises, we finally found a brilliant little motel, the Aachen Motel. The rate was the same as the first motel we had tried, but the decision to stay here was all in the service we received. The woman dealing with us was looking after the motel for her son, who was away on holiday, and she was so pleasant, and so welcoming after our other negative experiences, that we decided to stay the night without hesitation. She even insisted that we inspect the room before making any final decision! So, having had a bit of fun trying to get the motel credit card system to accept my card, we checked in.

And that was exactly when the monsoon started. This wasn’t like any rain we had ever seen. We could hear it in the motel battering the roof. All the drains in Greymouth flooded. Lightning flashed repeatedly all night long.

If we were in the van, it would have been the point on our holiday where we started looking for return tickets home.

But we weren’t. We were, for the second night in a row, tucked up nice and warm (and dry) in our little brick built haven!

I think our camping days, if not entirely over for this trip, are going to be few and far between from now on!

Total Distance Driven In New Zealand : 1,775km