Pancake Rocks are Cool

In Punakaiki, sort of the last major unique stop on the West Coast, heading north, before you turn back into the mountains, the main attraction is the Pancake Rocks. It's a bit like Arches or Bryce Canyon in Utah, except it is right in the water (and thus water- rather than wind-carved). A few particularly cool things about it:

1) The waves explode in the rocks' caves in a spectacular fashion, though not a fashion captured by me on camera, sadly.
2) As Julie pointed out, unlike Arches, the crashing water lets you see the rock formations being formated right in front of you.
3) They don't know what causes the pancaking feature (the flattened layers seen in the pictures). One of the "last geological mysteries."

Just north of Punakaiki is Punakaiki Beach Camp. We planned on staying there originally, and it looked really nice as we zoomed by. Since it was sunny, and it was still early, we decided to make more time and head into the Buller Gorge and up the mountains to Murchison, hopefully to do some whitewater rafting the next day (this was day 6 already). After the Subaru Debacle, this was our Second Big Mistake. The weather, spectacular in Punakaiki, turned bad in the Gorge. They were predicting more bad weather the next day, and Murchison was boring, so we decided to skip the rafting altogether, and just head all the way to Nelson, on the north coast. That's a long day's drive, from the Glaciers to Nelson (stops 4 and 7 on the map, respectively--5 and 6 are Hokitika and Punakaiki).

The merit of this plan was that we could do some wine tasting in the Nelson area the next day, before heading for our final destination, sea kayaking (or so we thought!) in Abel Tasman National Park. The demerit was that we would have had a great sunny afternoon and warm evening in Punakaiki, which we ended up trading for a night (night 6) in rain-full and campsite-unfriendly Nelson, a town we both decided was overrated, given its sizeable reputation. So we found our second motel of the trip (and our last, we vowed), which was a crummy rathole. And we spent our evening unexplainedly glued to a showing of the godawful movie "Jersey Girl." The low point of our trip in many ways.

But the West Coast, capped with the Pancake Rocks, is definitely a must see. Beautiful.