A royal west coast trip

We headed away for queen's birthday for a monster west coast road trip which involved 1000kms of driving and surprisingly little rain. Left chch on a gorgeously sunny day with snow on the hills and headed over lewis pass to the coast. Spent quite a bit of time driving backwards and forwards in karamea trying to find a camp ground that wasn't on a rugby field or in someone's back paddock before heading up to kohaihai and the end of the road. This turned out to be the world's best campsite (shhh...don't tell anyone) - right on the beach with nikau palms and hardly anyone else around.

Kohaihai is at the start of the Heaphy Track (which looks ripper and is totally on my to do list), so spent a bit of time kicking around amongst the nikaus along the first bit of the track.

The Oparara Arches and the promise of blue ducks beckoned, so it was off on a fabulous drive along a windy, steep-arse gravel through some superb podacarp forest.

Unfortunately the ducks weren't playing the game but the arch was pretty impressive and I spent lots of time salivating over interesting duck habitat. There were also some pretty impressive spiders hanging out in some of the caves in the area. Those things were massive!!

After an encounter with a couple of insistent weka, we headed down then coast to punakaiki with various stops along the way. Here ends the first installment of the royal west coast trip. I am supposed to be writing 2 papers today and so far I haven't even opened a single relevant file. I'll be back with more pics soon :o)