To save money, breakfasts throughout our trip were to consist of mostly cereal or toast. Today we forgot about a key element involved in eating Sultana Bran - MILK! In most of the motels we've stayed in throughout New Zealand they give you a small bottle of real milk for your tea and coffee instead of the single serve long life milk they usually give you in Australia. Unfortunately, 300mL of milk isn't exactly enough for 2 bowls of cereal with tea and coffee, so when we came to eat our breakfast we realised we had a problem. We tried to get away with using just a small amount of milk each but this barely wet the cereal at all. This is where we got creative. Chris decided to try orange juice. Apparently it wasn't so bad, but I wasn't convinced. I decided to try pouring some hot tea over mine - this was not a brilliant idea.
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| Tea-flavoured Sultana Bran anyone? |
In the end, after much gagging and varying attempts to wash it down with water, I gave up and had tea for breakfast instead.
With that, we left for our first road trip on the South Island - from Picton to Greymouth. Once again taking the advice of the car rental lady, we decided to take the slightly longer route so we could drive through the wineries in the Marlborough region. Since neither of us care for wine too much, we decided to replace the standard wine tour with a visit to Makana Confections. If you ever get the chance, this place is definitely worth a look. Here you can find all sorts of delicious goodies, from truffles and gelées to my favourite macadamia butter toffee crunch.
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Macadamia Butter Toffee Crunch
Via |
You can watch these treats being made right before your eyes and they even offer you samples while you watch. I assume this is to prevent people drooling too much and making a mess. Their confectionery doesn't come cheap so I ended up spending NZ $25 on a 250g box of macadamia butter toffee crunch. But it was definitely worth it, even if my brother did eat half the box!
Afterwards, Chris convinced me to go across the road and run through a vineyard. You know, as you do.
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| Run, Forrest, run! |
I was a bit worried a scary farmer might jump out and chase us away. But it's New Zealand, so naturally there was not a soul in sight and we were free to gallop around the vineyard taking photos. We even stole a grape each!
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| Pro tip: winery grapes may look delicious but they are very sour! |
Once we'd expelled enough energy, we got back in the car for the drive to Greymouth. The next 4 hours were classic road trip: music, snacks and bad GPS navigation.
Greymouth is located on the West Coast of New Zealand, right on the water so as soon as we got to our motel we hurried down to their so called "beach". It turned out their beach didn't really have sand but had rocks instead. This is a bit of a let down when you're used to our beautiful Australian beaches. Nonetheless, it was a lovely place for an afternoon walk and the ocean smell was as amazing as always.
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| Chris the environmentalist tried to plant a stick... |
Later that night as we were eating dinner, I realised the beach here did have something we don't have in Queensland - a sunset over the ocean! At 9pm we headed back down to the beach to catch a glimpse of the sunset before bed. On the way, we couldn't resist stopping for a play on the awesome playground behind our motel. It was one of the old wooden playgrounds just like we had as kids, with a massive flying fox and a not-so-slippery slide. Even I was giddy with excitement over this.
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| Look at me go |
And finally, I got the ocean sunset I'd always wanted to see and it was just as beautiful as I'd imagined.
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| Simply stunning |
xx Kate-Lyn
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