Day 12 – Friday 10 April

A little overcast but not cold, an early breakfast in downtown Westport & then a look through the museum at the Westport Tourist i-Site. This is primarily a museum focused on the coal mining industry from the first coal discovery in the mid 1800s, through to now, including the rail, shipping & port activities. The museum is new with good signage & well set out. Most of the buildings in town are wooden, though there are a couple of nice art-deco stone buildings. A lot of the former stone buildings were destroyed in a large earthquake in the 1920s.

Cape Foulwind (named by James Cook in 1770) is only a short drive out of town & we stopped on the northern lighthouse side to start with at a very nice picnic area before driving around to the southern side & walking the short distance to the resident New Zealand fur seal colony. In the carpark an inquisitive native Weka (bird) was looking for a handout. There is a nice large viewing platform with lots of seal pups on the rocks below & playing in the rock pools. A number of mothers were sunning themselves on rocks & feeding their pup. Spoilt only by the sandfies chewing on us again, they really are a pest.

We then headed off towards Nelson, following the Buller River upstream & through the Buller Gorge, a very twisty narrow road, absolutely magnificent scenery with a very large & fast flowing Buller River close below. Each bend in the road brought us another stunning vista. By the time we reached Murchison it was time for a late lunch. Murchison is another old town brought to life by tourism with jet boats, white water rafting, white water canoeing & zip-lining, all on the fast flowing Buller River.

The scenery & views continued all the way to Nelson, opening out to rural farmland with sheep, cattle & vineyards the closer we got to Nelson. We managed to find our motel, settle in then dinner at the Hot Rock Cafe, the owner sat us at his most romantic table with a candle. We ordered a gourmet Nelson Bays Pizza, which was topped with local seafood – it was delicious. We enjoyed another wonderful day.