Greymouth. Neither grey nor a mouth. Discuss.

It was another scenic drive south & west across the South Island, to the west coast. We stopped in Greymouth just to break up the drive (luckily, there’s a brewery in town – but that’s later.) First, the drive…

We drove past lots of green hills, many with sheep:

We took a short detour to look at Lake Rotoroa (not to be confused with sulphur-stinky Rotorua) in Nelson Lakes National Park. Black swans are all over New Zealand.

Then the mountains got bigger & greener, with some picturesque rivers running through them.

I don’t know if we’ve mentioned the one-lane bridges yet… I would say that you average one or 2 per hour on the South Island.

Here’s a nice straight one with visibility to the other side:

And here’s a one-lane section (with some mountain hanging overhead) that’s completely blind… Yes, there is 2-way traffic on this road:

Once we got to the coast, we stopped at a bay just south of Westport, where we did a short hike and saw more gorgeous views, some funny flightless birds, and a New Zealand fur seal colony:

More pretty coastal driving,

And then we made one final stop at Punakaiki, or “pancake rocks.” It’s a very impressive national park with a long well-maintained walkway out to the cliffs and rock formations. The rock formations are incredible, and still mysterious – Scientists know that these formations were formed underwater, made cumulatively of the remains of dead sea life. What they can’t say for sure is why it settled in layers, and such evenly-spaced layers. Wind & water continue to change the formations.

Finally, we arrived in Greymouth, which has this clock tower, and a brewery.

Needless to say, we took the brewery tour. Monteith’s Brewery, great beer. It was a very cool tour, and we were the only ones to show up for the 7:30 tour, so it was a private tour!

We saw the rooms and equipment of the entire production process, including the raw ingredients, brewing, fermenting, cold-filtering, and bottling.

And of course, tasting!

The tour also included dinner at a nearby restaurant, where we met 2 new friends from Australia, Loz (short for Lauren) & Brad – we later met up with them in Franz Josef & in Queenstown.