We had a long drive today from Franz Joseph to Nelson at the top of North Island. After we left the Alpine area the weather and landscape were uniformly grey, and continued so until we left the suitably named Greymouth and headed inland through mining and then agricultural areas into Nelson, where the climate was suddenly Mediterranean.

We stopped for lunch at a little town called Reeftown, once famous as the first city in the Southern Hemisphere to have public street lighting. It is a nice little place, frayed at the ages and, I would guess, largely unchanged in the last fifty years or so. There is still a working gold mine just outside the town.

PS: We are walking in the Abel Tasman National Park for the next few days, so there will be no more pictures until we return.