I missed some days but I am about to catch up right now! So Saturday was the first day on our tour so Anas and I dropped off our car and walked to the bus station and took the bus as close to our location as we could get where we were meeting the rest of the tour. It was kind of a long walk with all of our luggage but we managed it. We saw a few older buildings that were completely shattered from the earthquakes. It seemed that the newer buildings got out alive though so that’s something good. A lot of the locals that we talked to said they were out of water and electricity for a month or more but they were all in very good spirits because they knew they had it better than a lot of other people who lost their homes or jobs because of the disaster.
Once we reached our destination the bus came and picked us up. There were four of us all together but we went and picked up more people. Our first destination was Greymouth New Zealand. The drive up there was unbelievable and amazing scenery but it was a long ride. Very enjoyable though. We reached Greymouth and checked into our hotels. Our tour picked us up about 10 after noon so we did not have a full day, we pretty much had time to check-in, eat, and explore a little bit. The group had a scheduled tour of a local brewery named Monteith’s and then free beer after to taste all of the different kinds of beer and non-beer. After our tour we had a delicious dinner included in our tour at a nice restaurant that played Rugby. That was a lot of fun. We just met some new people and hung out with them for the whole time. The bus left the restaurant at 9pm to head back to the hostel.
We stayed in a very nice hostel and it had a trampoline, game room, tv internet room (no, internet is not included and it’s very expensive which is why my blog posts did not make it on my blog on time), and a bunch of other nice necessities. I shared a room with three other girls. All the boys shared and all of the girls shared. They were all very nice but we all didn’t hang out that much because we were just there to sleep. Once we got back from dinner Anas and I and our new 3 friends (Ben, Alex and David) all wanted to go on a walk on the beach because it was still early. So we walked for a little while, looked for Jade stones (they are very common in that area but we didn’t have luck) and walked a little more till we noticed a fire on a beach and headed that way. Once we reached the fire we stood around and talked to a family that was there and they were so nice. They were from Christchurch and there house is okay but a little damaged and they were glad to be alive and safe. We talked to them for a while and they shared their marshmallows with us and it was Anas’s first time roasting a marshmallow so we taught him how to do it.
We stayed at the fire for a little longer and looked for more rocks and walked back because we needed to get to bed because we had an early morning and a long day planned for Easter Sunday.
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