Sunday - a little bit brighter

Up at 7, anxious to get confirmation that our bus was coming, because neither of the Saturday buses had made it down from Westport, which was getting hammered by the weather.  And the Sunday bus didn't make it either, as the roads in/out of Westport were closed, and I think they evacuated 2,000 people, or half the town.  At this point, I pulled the plug on the bus and looked around for other options.  There were no hire cars to be had for love nor money - not that I was particularly keen to drive the mountain road back over, even assuming we could get all the way across - so we searched around for alternatives and discovered there was an airport at Hokitika which flew to Christchurch twice a day.  This was infinitely superior to the ghastly bus, although between the flights and the extra nights' accommodation, it basically doubled the cost of our entire trip and the credit card took a battering from which it will be slow to recover.  But the alternative seemed to be to sit patiently in Greymouth until a bus could escape Westport and it's very likely that we would still be sitting there come Christmas. 

Caught the shuttle/taxi down to Hokitika and tried our luck at getting on the evening flight (slim chance, given that it said no available seats and there were four of us, but when Greg enquired, it transpired that the morning flight had had technical difficulties and they'd had to cancel it so all those passengers were also trying to get out).  We cut our losses and found a hotel.  

The sun had come out and it was lovely, if not warm.  Holly, deprived of her pounamu tour, romped joyously onto the beach and started collecting greenstone.  Or green stones, as it turned out, because there is a lot of "fool's pounamu" and when we hauled her rocks to the authentication place, none of hers were real.  The guy in the store was quite nice to her and explained what to look for, so I took her back down, but the tide was well in and VERY foamy for some reason - you can see in the photo that it actually looks like snow on the beach!  So I said we'd try and nip down before our 8am departure on Monday.  In the meantime, we walked down to Sunset Point and saw two glorious sights - first, the sun descending into the Western sea (only slightly marred by low cloud) and the pink reflections off the mountains behind us, and secondly, a plane.  We could not have been more exited to see it than if we'd been stranded on a desert island for a year!