Gold!

Feb 17th: A hot sunny day. We spent the morning on the town of Hokitika (pronounced Ho-ker-ticker) which was a gold mining town in the 1860s but is now a craft centre for tourists. It specialises in jade, or pounamu as the Maori call it. We saw some glass-blowing and looked at the carved jade and found a handmade fudge shop – my favourite! We visited the town’s museum and the boys completed a quiz and were each given a small piece of jade as a prize. We had lunch on the beach next to and running parallel with the main street. The first photo shows Steve making a construction from some of the driftwood there. As you can see, the beach is empty again. We spent some time collecting specks of sparkly gold mica from the sand.
After lunch we drove north for about half an hour to Greymouth. The second photo shows a fabulous roadsign that made us chuckle. It was used where the road and railtrack share a single lane bridge, and it certainly explains the danger well!
The campsite in Greymouth is on the beach and also right at the end of the runway so several small aircraft have zoomed in over our head. There is an excellent playground here, see next photo. On the left is a jumping pillow which lots of the good playgrounds in NZ have. The fourth photo shows the boys making sandcastles on the beach after tea, and the final one is of me enjoying a moment’s peace while they do so.