Day 22: Wednesday, March 12, Murchison

Man-eating wekas are known to lurk in hedgerows in wait of passing cars. Well...

Today was mostly spent driving. We stopped outside of Westport to see another seal colony. All of the colonies we have seen have little ponds formed by water splashing up on the rocks in which the little seals are always playing.

We went though Murchison and ended up staying for a couple of hours, mostly due to one place. We found a resale shop called Somebody’s Treasure, which was almost an estate sale shop. Included in the clutter were old telephones (hand crank telephone, anyone?), Kodak Brownie cameras, Wedgewood and china, and a spark plug with several screws glued to it to form the shape of a dragster. We spent most of our time looking through lots of old books. I would have bought some except that I don’t have a way to get them back to the states. There were also a lot (probably 75+) airline-sized bottles of liquors, most of which were really old. (Aged Scotch might be expensive, but when stuff is coagulating and falling to the bottom it’s probably a little too old.) Someone obviously collected them and then sold them or died.

Main Street Murchison. Any NZ town looks like this, and even downtown city streets have the adjoining logo-covered overhangs and classic small-town facades.

The South Island of NZ is very narrow and is about 250 km across at some points. The whole thing is so mountainous, though, that drive times are greatly extended. Some guys were talking about taking a trip to Mt. Cook from Greymouth; they could take a 1.5 day car trip or a 45 flight by private plane. We have only seen two police cars patrolling the intercity highways here on the South Island, and the terrain is probably part of the reason. The speed limit might be 100 kph, but there are few stretches where you can do that for any prolonged time. The windy roads naturally check speeders.