Greymouth - Montieth's Brewery
Trip Start
Nov 21, 2007
1
37
158
Trip End
Oct 01, 2008
Greymouth, South Island, New Zealand
Sunday, February 10, 2008
The next stop was for a quick view of some rock formations called Punakaiki Pancake Rocks. They are named that because the rocks on the coast look like stacks of pancakes. You will just have to see the pics to understand, but it was pretty cool. Also, there are pics of the fern trees you see everywhere here in NZ. The fern leaf is the symbol of the All Blacks Rugby team too.
We stayed at a hostel called Neptune's backpackers in Greymouth. It was cool because they gave us a towel, soap and a mint. This is HIGH QUALITY for a backpacker stay
Cool river shot from bus
. Seriously, we both made multiple comments about this. There is not a ton to look at or do in Greymouth but we did go on a brewery tour of Monteith's beer. We did get to see the beer fermenting which was pretty cool, but stunk. They only have 6 people that work there full time (they have other breweries in Auckland and Christchurch, but Monteith's started in Greymouth). Five of those 6 have been there over 20 years! We wondered how much free beer they had to give them to keep them....of course we got to taste too which helps. Layton liked the Golden Ale and Jana liked the Summer special edition that had a hint of ginger to the flavoring. We then went to a local bar to have all you can eat sausage BBQ which was pretty good. Did you know that NZ allows gambling in bars? They had a card game set up when we walked in and horse races running the whole time. Pretty crazy if you ask us. We met another driver from another tour company whose name was Dallas. We have since seen him along the road. He was fun to chat with.
Election update: We are up to 10 people who have asked us about the election. The 10th was a couple from Australia. They were sick of the coverage their media was giving the US election because they had just had an election themselves which meant 6 months of nonstop media for them too. They were a great couple and the woman had just finished a marathon in Westport. We passed the marathon on our way through.
Also, we have not met or seen many Americans in NZ. However, in the past few days, we have found a few more. Beth is from Virgina and been traveling for 8 months. We met a guy named Dave that is from San Fran who used to work for Salesforce.com. There is another guy from California on our bus, but we can't remember his name. We talked to a girl in Dunedin who was from Kentucky and was traveling by herself for a year. That is about it. Just another nugget of info.
