Mahinapua

A short drive from the town was Cape Foulwind and Taranga Bay where we had a short walk to one of NZ's largest seal colonies and also NZ's closest point to Australia, not that you can see it or anything! After that nice fresh blast of coastal air we cruised down past Charleston and on to the Punakaiki pancake rocks. These were a series of straitfied limestone stack which, over thousands of years had been eroded to give the effect of giant piles of neatly stacked pancakes.

Our next stop was Greymouth where we picked up some more passengers who had come from Christchurch and then went shopping for items we needed for the fancy dress party. It was decided the theme was that you had to be something that started with the first letter of you name. Most people thought of something straight away but I was really having trouble with 'K' so I decided I would have a look around and see if I got any inspiration. After a lot of debating I finally settled on a 'Killer' it was the best I could come up with :) So I bought a white T-shirt from the charity shop, some fake blood to smear on it and an axe, which was my deadly weapon!!

We were stopping the night at the Lake Mahinapua Hotel where we got to meet Les who ran the place, he's about 85 and absolutely hilarious. We had a BBQ group meal and then got changed to go to the bar for the evening aptly named the "poo pub". Id smeared my red blood on the t-shirt earlier and left it to dry so it was ready for me to put on after dinner, grabbed my axe and was all set. Everyone went dressed up and some people had really amusing costumes, especially this french guy called pierre who went as a pervert haha - I do have a pic and its hilarious!

The 'poo pub' takes a group photo of every group that stays there which are dated so Its really good to look through them all. So if you knew the date that someone stayed there you would be able to look up there pic which is kool.