Paparoa and The Blue Ice Cafe

In the morning we continued down the western coast, which from what we saw was an extraordinarily violent and turbulent coast. The surf consisted of about thirty feet of continuous frothy breakers, the nearest of which slammed into the beach like a hammer upon an anvil. We stopped at Paparoa National Park, which is known for pancake rocks and blowholes. I had no idea what pancake rocks were but we liked these little stops to stretch the legs. As it began to rain again, we walked along a paved path that meandered through rainforest and then flax field (flax is surprisingly tall). At the first opening through the flax we saw pancake rocks, which were really cool. They were essentially layers of rock stacked on top of one another (looking like pancakes) that had been eroded and weathered into cool shapes. We passed a number of formations until coming to the first blowhole, which is exactly what it sounds like—there are holes in the rocks, the bottoms of which are exposed to the sea. When the tide is high, waves crash below the holes sending spray up through the hole. Very, very cool to witness. The paved path, itself, wove across narrow ledges around various holes in the rock. We stopped at Greymouth for lunch. In doing my research for the trip, my friend Dave told me to skip Greymouth, as it was the biggest waste of time on his trip. On the last curve in the road before Greymouth, the skies opened in thunderous approval with Dave’s assessment of the town. We arrived at Franz Josef that night. Franz Josef is a small town with access to the Franz Josef glacier. The town is small and quaint with a lot of accommodations. We perused the many, many tour vendors situated on the main road. Ingrid and I evaluated our options for seeing the glacier. Because of Ingrid’s Achilles, knee, and back troubles (none serious) since our hike in Abel Tasman, so we decided to sign up for the modern adventure tour of sight seeing the glacier via helicopter. The soonest available tour was the following day at noon, so we wandered up to the recommended Blue Ice Café for dinner. The Blue Ice Café was an interesting little restaurant. It had classic New Zealand cuisine, although with an Asian flare. Again, we started off with the green-lipped mussels. These were served in a coconut curry broth with “capzican” (New Zealand for red and green peppers). Delicious broth, good mussels. I had the “Irish” – braised beef on mushrooms and mashed potatoes. It was topped by weird squid sausages (sausages cut and cooked to look like squid). The dish was beautiful but had a weird tang to it. Ingrid got the “Green” – lamb chops in a green herb sauce. The lamb was beautifully cooked and tender. We did get dessert, but it wasn’t worthy of not except for the title of Ingrid’s Banoffee Pie – a mixture of bananas and toffee.