Have we been here before?

A couple of days into our NZ travels we both find ourselves with an, odd almost nostalgic déjà vu - like stumbling upon a fuzzily childhood memory of a place we've never actually visited. Yes, something about this place is weirdly familiar. Maybe it's the sounds of the bird call in the trees, the fresh summer air or the smells of broom and pine in the great outdoors, or maybe the faintly old fashioned Englishness of so many of the places we visit. Whatever the reason, it's odd - just at the point we are about as far from home as it's possible to be, it's easy to imagine quite the opposite.

Anyway, after arriving into Te Annau from Queenstown we decide to give Grace the day off and join a small tour group on a minibus for the trip down to Milford Sound, where the idea is to join one of the boats taking a cruise around the fjord. This (the going on the bus) turns out to be a very good call. As we leave Te Annau it's raining hard; by the time we emerge from the Homer tunnel into the heart of Fjordland, the heavens are battering us with a fury that has us thankful we're rolling on four wheels, not two.

The main  point of the cruise is to get up close and personal with some of the many waterfalls that tumble down for the mountains into the fjord. It's an undeniably spectacular sight; nature at its rawest, don't-mess-with-me best. Great material for photos, but we can't put any on the blog because some idiot messed up charging the IPad, which means we had to take our shots on the camera, which we can only upload to the blog via the apple Mac, which we left behind with the rest of our luggage in Christchurch. So we'll all have to wait a bit for that bit of drama.

Leaving Te Annau we were meant to return to Queenstown for the night, but, mindful of some more wet weather headed our way, decided to get further down the road to Wanaka, where we spend one pleasant evening by the lake before heading on next day on the road through the mountains to the west coast. Here, finally, there is no dodging the rain, and I get the chance to don my fluorescent Michelin man outfit as the waterproofs go on. In actual fact tho, the reality of motorcycling in the
rain is often not as bad as the prospect*, and such was the case here. A couple of hundred kilometres in the wet across the Haast Pass and we reach our destination, Fox Glacier - alpine cute in the sunshine, no doubt, but possessed of a rather dooms, back-woodsy twin peaks kind of feel in the murk. Next day the skies clear, and we visit the two glaciers - Fox and Franz Josef before moving on. Bad weather is common in these parts, and it carries a risk. A few weeks earlier, a sightseeing helicopter had crashed on Fox killing all on board, four Brit tourists included.

Sunday mornings ride takes up the west coast to Greymouth, a break point in the journey up to Nelson. We stay at the Scenicland motel, and it's excellent - a vast sprawl of rooms all to ourselves, with cooking facilities and access to a BBQ outside. Greymouth itself, however, is anything but
scenic - a drab, industrial sprawl radiating out from the harbour and a meagre town centre. It's a
working town rather than a tourist resort and makes to pretence to be otherwise, but on a Sunday
afternoon, even a sunny one, Greymouth seems as dour and drear as it's name suggests. So no photos
here, either.

(*not necessarily the consensus view of the entire party)