Rainforest!

The west coast is beautiful. We hadn't really seen much of the shoreline proper until today -- just glimpses, and the near-shore country. Today, our bus took a coast-hugging road, and once we passed Greymouth we were deluged in beauty. It's a rugged coast: grey pebble beaches slope quickly up through flax-and-fern scrub to the steep slopes cloaked in dense, moss-draped rātā and tree-fern rainforest. Bedrock frequently juts out into the surf, sculpted into fluted shapes (which, now that I think of it, bear a certain resemblance to the ice of yesterday's glacier) by the relentless sea. It was windy today, so the surf crashed on the beaches with measured, smashing sledgehammer blows. The rainforest on the mountains was a landscape out of Hollywood -- masses of forked white rātā branches lofting masses of glossy small leaves, smaller climbing rātā growing right out of a nikau palm's trunk, tree ferns with fronds bigger than I am, cabbage trees and huge ancient rātās towering here and there above the canopy. It's an amazing place.

Punakaiki, today's destination, is barely a town -- really just a few souvenir shops and hotels clustered around the main entrances to Paparoa National Park. There isn't even a grocery store. We'd expected to be pretty much in and out: this is just a pit stop on the way to Nelson, since we couldn't get all the way there in one day. The place has already proved us wrong and left me wishing dearly to come back.

For one thing, our "hostel" is a thing out of fantasy. It's 3 km from town, but a friendly Welsh lady (the proprietor, I suspect) picked the four of us up at the bus stop and brought us out to Te Nikau Retreat. The place deserves its name: tucked back in the rainforest, it's a complex of 4 or 5 assorted small buildings, each furnished like an honest-to-goodness vacation home. Our building is a cozy wood-frame house complete with with verandah, well-appointed kitchen, squashy sofas, cast-iron stove, and working record player. The bedrooms include our 4-person dorm -- just mattresses on little frames, really, but cozy and done up in glowing wood panelling -- a double, and a tiny loft. It's basically a very nice bed and breakfast (giant muffins $2, fresh bread $5) at $28 for the night. I keep wondering whether I should pinch myself.

We moved in, explored the house in a whirlwind of excited and incredulous exclamations, then descended on the grounds. Mostly healthy rainforest (our window looks out on palms and a big rata), the place also contains a few other Te Nikau houses connected by gravel trails (almost singletrack, just wide enough to accommodate luggage). One of the trails leads off the property, connecting via a gravel road to a DOC trail leading down through the bush to a secluded and stunning beach.

It's a microcosm of the coastline, really. A half-moon of small pebbles cast up in the arms of sculpted tan sandstone; flax on the bluff-edge above, tossing like long hair in the wind; a ribbon-thin stream plunging onto the rocks, then cutting a shallow channel down toward the surf; wind-frothed swells crashing onto rock promontories or rumbling up the strand. The four of us tumbled over it, exploring every available corner, snapping heaps of photos, and generally adoring it. Claudia and I shucked our shoes and ran around barefood until our lack of calluses made abrasive acquaintance with the gravel. I vowed to come back in the morning -- early light on that cove will make a gorgeous painting.

Then it was back to Te Nikau, a mad dash through a squall of hail to the shelter of our cozy house and a quick, companionable dinner with a friend who happened to be in the same hostel. Afterwards, once Cindy and I had washed the dishes, we four curled up in the living room with mugs of tea and our journals or knitting, talking comfortable. I felt more at home right then than I have since coming to New Zealand.