Westport

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After having a quiet night in Nelson, I headed on the next morning to Westport on the bus. After a short journey, we arrived at Lake Rotoiti, to do the walk around the lake. The whole bus got off and started walking through the forest on the periphery of the lake.

I wasn't quite prepared for the breakneck speed Barton led the group round at, I was using all my concentration to skip from slick-wet tree roots, across the boggy ground. After about an hour or so, we finally emerged on the lake front, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief, as although I wasn't still under with the flu, I wasn't firing on all cylinders at all.

Buller's Gorge jet-boating, Westport pool and drinking

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A few people off the bus jumped into the lake, I didn't fancy this myself as it was chilly to say the least ! I chilled out skimming stones on the lake, and headed back on the bus. I'd signed on to do a jetboat ride on the Buller gorge when we arrived at Westport, as I hadn't been on one of this type of boats before, and was curious about how it would be.

When we arrived at the Buller's activity lodge, a bloke with the charisma of Chris Moyles (i.e. none) jumped on and explained about the jetboat ride, some people were also doing horse trekking. We all got dressed up in ridiculous clothes (as always with these trips), and went out on this jet boat.

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The jet boat was invented by a New Zealand bloke, as he found the river was too shallow for propeller boats. This also means you can flick the boat around and do spins by suddenly reversing one of the jets. All in all it was a good laugh, and interesting to hear the stories about this gorge. The road is set perilously under a huge overhanging cliff, and there are 5m metal pins to stop it from collapsing.

After this, we went back to the hostel to get dried out. As I say, the boat trip was fun when he started doing spins, but I got a load of water down my back, and was a bit cold. It was pretty nice in the hostel, after a while Steve and myself headed down to find a pub serving food.

Now the West Coast of NZ is known for being full of rednecks, and the pub we ended up at had its fair share. After having a bit of food, we started playing pool with some of the guys in the pub. There was a comedy moment when the owner of the pub uncovered the table, and pulled it into the middle of the room, as the legs were really unbalanced. After you took the triangle up after racking the balls up, they all just slid onto the right hand side cushion !

They locals  seemed pretty cool, although they were a bit strange. We were on a drink called 'Macs Gold', which we found out from the beer tasting in the Nelson hostel was made without preservatives, and so didn't give you a bad hangover the next day.