Greymouth

Last week I went to the town of Greymouth. I wanted to go on a trip and I literally picked somewhere on a map that looked within a reasonable distance of where I'm living. I knew nothing about the town except that when I told people where I was planning on going the general response was "Greymouth?! Why are you going there?" Due to this reaction I was not expecting big things from the place and as it turned out there really wasn't a whole pile there. I walked around, I went to the Monteith's Brewery (frickin' awesome beer), I went to the museum and at that point I had exhausted almost all that there was to do there.

Brewing some delicious beer at Monteiths

Watching a delicious sunset down by the sea

Luckily for me Greymouth is the home of the Wild West adventure tours and I promptly booked myself onto one of those bad boys to go zip lining into a gorge, inner tubing down a river and finally up a cave to see some glow worms dotting the ceiling looking ever so much look a tiny blue constellation of stars. It was extremely cold so they gave us (us being two Aussie girls over on holidays and a Kiwi down visiting his family) many layers to try and keep out the icy river water. We were wearing:

3 x thermal tops

1 x thermal tights

2x thermal socks

1x waterproof socks

1 x wellingtons

2 x wetsuits

1 x dry jacket

1 x wetsuit jacket

1 x pair of gloves

1 x skull cap and helmet

Getting into this amount of gear took 45 minutes of pulling, tugging and general cursing and then we were driven to the location 30 minutes outside town. Despite the many, many layers that made it difficult to do more than waddle we all got pretty wet and cold.

After the adventure was over we were driven back to headquarters where they fired up the jacuzzi and gave us beer and muffins to enjoy while we soaked away the cold.