Tour De West Coast

We woke up to the sound of sandflies hopping on the tent.

How peaceful.

There were literally so many that it sounded like raindrops. By the way, if you don’t know what sandflies are just imagine that they are like mosquitoes (or mozzies as they are called here), but smaller, more persistent, do not care about repellent and the worst of all – there are bazillions of them.

We quickly got the heck outta there. We started our drive down the West Coast, with plans to stop and see a few sights along the way. This was a our “big driving day.”

First stop was the Operara Basin and Moria arch. They are both arches formed by limestone and rivers, and quite cool! It has taken millions of bazillions of years for these to form this way – and they are in a very Jurassic park type of environment – we had to hike in 20 minutes from the parking lot, which was another 30 minutes down a gravel road! People like pictures though, so here are a few:







Also, on our hike out there, John knelt to tie his shoe and a little bird came flying down, and landed on the tree next to him. Then it jumped on the ground next to him. That’s when John noticed, “Hey look at the bird!” (Roughly a foot from his foot now). John stands upright, bird hops onto his foot! John doesn’t even wince, claiming later, “I thought it was a little odd. I would have probably cared if I was wearing sandals.” That John. He is so nutty. Here is a picture of the bird, which John took right in the bird’s little face. We named the bird “Henry” because Henry is so friendly!



We continued our drive down. It was a very pretty, scenic drive down the Coast and the weather was pretty nice for us. We then stopped at the pancake rocks. Everything on the West Coast that is carved out is because of the limestone, water combination – the pancake rocks are no exception. Here are some pictures of these pancake rocks. The café serves pancakes across the street on the highway – we didn’t get any, but points for jumping on that business opportunity. I wish they were named cupcake rocks though.





We arrived finally at the Franz Josef Glacier, and our first destination where we stayed in a little bit of a nicer facility! We were supposed to be staying in this room that the “lets go” book recommends, but upon arriving discovered there are lots of Marian Ladenburgs around because another one evidently checked in under my reservation at 1 PM. I didn’t find this elusive other ML, nor much did I care because we were upgraded as a result of that mistake to a room that cost twice as much with (drumrolllllllllll) an attached bathroom! Also had a little TV, hot pot, fridge – okay, it was pretty much the Taj Mahal. There was a nice sunset that night and it was cool because we could see the Alpine mountains, surrounded by rainforest. The end….of that day.