Thursday, February 21, 2008

Karamea to Nelson



The sun was also up this morning and the clarity of the air means that you can see for a great distance and also the colours are amazing. The journey to Nelson took us through the Buller Gorge, the gorge is very long and criss-crosses the same river until we reached Murchison a small town in the middle of nowhere where all the tourist buses stop on their way to the West Coast. The journey was through high mountains, across rivers and creeks and finally getting lower and arriving in Nelson mid afternoon. We settled our selves in this motel and then arranged the car ferry from Picton to Wellington for later this week and also caught up on a few outstanding emails.

For dinner, we decided to head downtown rather than self cater and the Motel boss recommended a nice seafood restaurant on the waters edge called the ‘Boatshed’ which sounded familiar and when we got there we realised that we had eaten here once before the last time we were in New Zealand in 2001. We had Nelson scallops to start followed by local Turbot, this restaurant is great and now one of my favourites.

On the way back to the motel we found a car wash and surprisingly there were no Polish or eastern bloc workers, I am not sure why, but they could make a living here. The car was very dusty because of all the gravel roads here.

The Motel is called ‘The Beaches’ we are not sure why as it is some way from the beach however it is nice and clean and modern and advertises ‘fast internet’. HA! I checked and this fast internet is actually very slow about 512, not fast at all, perhaps I may sue.