-Chapter 43- The unforeseeable last days of travel on the West Coast

We left civilization again after Wanaka. We spent a night at a campground near Lake Hawea, which definitely wasn't worth the money. (Compared to the showers here, the ones at Te Puke Holiday Park were super clean). To get to the toilet in the evening, you had to climb really high stairs without any light, and the laundry room smelled like fart.

For the next few days, we just drove, heading towards the West Coast. When we stopped at the Blue Pools, Flori reversed into our car while parking. (Luckily, not on the side with the dent from the kiwi farm, she couldn't have dealt with that again). But our Toyota Estima is a miracle car, because the corner only got dented once, and then it sprang back to its original shape, like a swim tube.

New Zealand's West Coast is intense. On one side of the road is the Pacific with huge waves and cliffs, and on the other side is a rainforest. We slept at a café in a dead zone at night, where we parked just one meter away from a wall of glowworms.

After that, we continued up the West Coast all the way to Hokitika. Along the way, we also passed by the glaciers, which we couldn't see because it was raining all day. We made an appointment with the job agency in Ashburton over the phone, where we had been before the trip. In Hokitika, we went to a small old-fashioned movie theater and watched "The Invisible Man". We were seated in the only huge auditorium that looked like an old theater, and we were the only visitors along with three other guests. It had been raining heavily for days. My two pairs of shoes were completely soaked, and I had to wear flip-flops for the next few days because they just wouldn't dry in the rainy weather.

We went back to Ashburton through Arthur's Pass. We stopped at Castle Hill again in the evening to have dinner on the rocks. (I had to climb up with socks and flip-flops), and the next day we had to pick up my white shoe that I had forgotten there overnight.

We drove the last two hours through Arthur's Pass, actually waited ten minutes at an intersection, and finally arrived in Ashburton.