Ice castles, pancake rocks and big, ugly whales

So, the West Coast. Although we mostly drove along it, there's no going around its beauty.
For starters, the weather here was ten times netter than we'd seen before. It was even possible to walk around without a jacket :-).
The second good point here were the glaciers. Now this is something different as to what you can see in, say, Switzerland. The Fox and Franz Josef glaciers exist of huge rocks of deep blue ice, sitting together wave after wave, retreating and advancing over many years. Because of several natural phenomena, the whole glacier exists of caves, tunnels and crevasses. This is what we came to explore.
We took a guided tour with Franz Josef Glacier Guides, where our guide Matt taught us some little tips and tricks so as to not stumble over our feet every five minutes. The trip took us over a large plain of glacier rockfall to the iceline, where we had to put on our crampons; a strangely different way of walking. After that the road was carved almost where we stood; every time when there would be trouble to walk, Matt started to carve steps and tracks into the ice. We went through a few of these tunnels and such, which was amazing!
The whole beautiful, impressive trip took us about 6 to 7 hours, and afterwards we were overwhelmed with a severe tiredness. Most of it went away after a good meal and a long session in our (free) camping hot pool though :-).
After the Franz Josef glacier, the road continued winding along the beautiful West Coast until we arrived at the Pancake Rocks in Punakaiki; strange limestone formations, quite worth the trip up there.
On we went towards the hot springs, which could be found more inland. Instead of going to the popular Hanmer Springs, we made a stop in the quieter, smaller Maruia Springs. Glad to have done this: there were only a few other people so we had the stinking, sulphurous baths almost to ourselves (they may stink but apparently they're good for you) as well as the traditional Japanese bath house. Yay for that! We even spared time (and money) for a personal body massage; gone were all the stress signs which we had attracted since the glacier walk :-).
The Maruia Springs were followed by a stop in Kaikoura; yes, for the attentive ones amongst you, back on the East Coast, where the scenery resembled that of the beginning of our trip a lot. Kaikoura is famous for it's whale watching tours; after all our marine wildlife excursions, we couldn't of course not do this one. The trip was quite a lot of money, but at least we got to see a big, black, ugly Great Sperm Whale - wahooo! Check for the whale.
From Kaikoura we went into Blenheim (nothing special, as most cities in NZ) where we stocked up and afterwards we went to the whine region, where we tasted a few and ventured to buy a bottle. This was after a hectic morning on the doc camping: us with our silly monads went camping in an extremely remote doc camping in the middle of the pouring rain ... And of course, the day after we got stuck in the mud and had to start looking for someone (in the wilderness) to pull us out, hehehehe *blush blush*. So we'd quite deserved that wine, thanks Sue and Jim for helping us! (we went to the winery where Sue had worked before).
Now we have arrived in Nelson, which brings me to the last part of my travels with Inge: after doing the Abel Tasman Coastal Track for 2 days, we need to bring Tony to Wellington where we split up. An era ending, another begins ...

For those of you who haven't seen them yet: new photos can be found on Facebook.