After recouping in fox glacier we rode a short, but still hilly, 20 km out to Gillespie beach. It was incredible to be able to see a massive glacier while you were chillin' on the beach. The sad thing was 'chillin on the beach' was actually furiously walking around waving your hands around your face trying to lose the sandflies. I don't think I've mentioned sand flies yet... just imagine a fruit fly, that doesn't die when you slap it, that bites. When we rolled into lake Paringa in our spandex our slender, exposed legs were eaten alive. Here we had our fly suits on as soon as we stopped moving, but they go straight for your face! I tried to make a PB&J and I had 5 flies go kamikaze into my peanut butter then three others go up my nose. It was ridiculous. We rested a day at the beach and hung out with some friends from Santa Cruz who drove out in their rented station wagon.
The next day we set off for Franz Joseph. It was about 60 km with a pretty massive climb. Our legs were feeling better but it seems our butts still can't hang with 40+ km rides. The grocery store was really expensive so we just treated ourselves to some bomb indian food. We stayed an extra day here to wait out some heavy rains.
Next we had our biggest ride yet, going from Franz Joseph to a campsite about 12 kms outside of Hokitika. We were feeling good after resting and the 115 km (70 mi) ride wasn't actually too bad. We totally devoured our cous cous with green curry tuna dinner. It was tastier than it sounds, but I guess anything is tasty after riding a bike for 8 hours.
Hokitika was full of jade carvers and different artists. It was a nice little beach town, but I think we were probably most excited about getting to our first supermarket on the west coast. We all made some epic dinners and revelled in the convenience of having everything easy and cheap.
We had an easy ride into Greymouth (an actual 'city' with over 4000 people!) where we took a tour of the Monteiths Brewery--Pride of the West coast. It turns out they don't actually brew the beer there. They do the cider in Greymouth and then their parent company brews most of the beer up in Auckland. We got to taste their 7 beers and have two beers of our choice. We shared the pub with just an english couple. After several minutes of struggling to understand them Skyler and Lucas started laughing in agreement. Convinced that the woman was only using vowels and no consonants, I just went along with it and later asked what we were talking about. Skyler told me they thought he looked like Colonel Mustard.
Yesterday we were excited because there were just showers forecasted (it seems like we get rained on 80% of the days) and the ride was gorgeous up the coast. It was reminiscent of Big Sur but with rain forest. The sea was very angry and it felt like it was going to storm on us and sure enough just before we got in to Punakaiki the sideways rain came. We gratefully pulled into the first hostel to find shelter and the man laughed when we said "gosh this miserable weather came out of nowhere."
"This is nothing, things start getting fishy when the 40 ft swells come in," said the receptionist. I guess I'm just not used to the New Zealand perspective on weather. All I know is if there was sideways rain in Santa Cruz, it wouldn't be called 'showers' it would be more like '4000 people without power in storm of the year.'
So far I've been the only one without bike troubles (knocking on wood), as Skyler broke two spokes and Lucas put some glass shards through his tire. My front tire is developing an interesting curve in the tube, but I'm just going to ride it out. Who know it could be the one piece that holds the rest of the bike together. So, I'm going to head back to the campsite to make instant rice packets with soup mixes, mmmmm.
More Pictures:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/56993065@N03/
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