The blow holes

Saturday afternoon we left the Arthur's pass behind us and we drove to the South Island's West Coast. The distance from there to the east coast is as the crow flies roughly just 110km/75mi, but the landscape is about as different as it gets. The reason behind this difference is the mountain range that stands between the two coasts. The wind, which like in most places usually comes from the west, crashes the clouds that come with it into the mountains and pours the rain out over them. As a result it rains a lot on the west coast (at some places up to a whopping 7 METERS per year). Most of the clouds will be empty before they can even reach the east coast, so at just a short distance from all this rain is an area that regularly suffers a draught. The vegetation is also completely different, as at the east coast there are a lot of plants that need very little water, whereas on the West coast there is a real rainforest.

Between that rainforest and the sea lies the tiny village where we have slept: Punakaiki. The village, which houses a few hundred souls, probably wouldn't even be on the map if it weren't for one of the most well-known tourist attractions of all the South Island being located near it: the pancake rocks with the blowholes. The pancake rocks are very funny layered rocks. Blowholes are small tunnels that are open to the sea on one end, and open to the sky on the other. Every time a wave comes in, the pressure builds up and the water squirts out on the topside.

However, for this to work there have to be waves at all :-) When we visited the blowholes it was high tide (that's when they work best), but the weather was very fine too and the sea was very calm. This resulted in a very unsatisfactory blow job; see on the photo the result of a half hour wait. Looking at my NZ photo site you can see what the blowholes can do when the weather is good (which in this case means: the weather is bad ;-)

We slept in Punakaiki Saturday night. The next day we visited a small cave there in which we spotted exactly one glowworm :-), after that we drove back to Christchurch via the beautiful Lewis pass. An Easter weekend well spent!