Last night we went to the Monteith’s Brewery and did the tour, which also included, according to the brochure, a Bar-b-que dinner. Obviously you just can’t trust the brochures around here. It turned out to be a $12.50 brochure for any of the Monteith Brewery Hotels. The tour was no where near the quality of the Speights brewery and the beer wasn’t as nice either.
We chose the hotel that had the best looking menu to go to, but when we went in we were told brewery voucher clients had to eat in the bar. The bar menu was not at all inviting so we ended up negotiating a deal where we got the good menu and paid the difference. The meals were not bad at all but the environment left a lot to be desired. Picture an old sort of run down pub, trying to capture an Irish theme with stag heads and old books adorning the walls, weird sayings under weird photos of old grumpy looking men and table and chairs that had the varnish wearing off and the vinyl wearing off the seats. Hmm! Not my idea of a nice dining area, now, the clientele, that’s another story, but picture men in short shorts or tracky pants with big boots and you will know what I mean. Anyway, we ate our meals and scurried back to our digs.
This morning we woke to a bit of drizzly rain and some wind. We wandered out behind the Motel to the beach; where we found some very rough weather, rough sea and lot and lots of driftwood and rubbish up on the beach. The sand was a dark grey in colour and about the consistency of ground black pepper, you could have put it in your peppershaker and no one would know the difference. The boys had a few goes on a flying fox that was part of the playground and I got to check us out because Gerard could not understand the woman the day before. Apparently her kiwi accent left him baffled. I got the man and he was quite easy to understand.
We went into town and wandered around the shops and through the jade display. We were leaving the car here in Greymouth and catching the train to Christchurch, so we booked our luggage in, handed back the car and went to the hotel for lunch. It was a lovely lunch in very nice surroundings, quite a contrast to the night before.
We boarded the train and started our journey back to Christchurch. The TransAlpine train journey is one of the six most picturesque train journeys in the world and it certainly lived up to that. The train wound its way through valleys, gorges and tunnels, up hill and down dale through the most picturesque scenery of rock filled rivers, tall snow-capped mountains and rolling hillsides. At one point through Arthurs Pass we went through an 8km long tunnel and in another section we went through 16 tunnels in 9km. A helicopter followed us for a large part of the journey and spent a lot of time letting its passengers take photos of the train, obviously we were taking photos of them at the same time. It came down quite close quite a few times. The major drama we had was the reflection in the windows made it hard to take photos. The weather had cleared up and it was quite sunny at times.
We arrived on time in Christchurch at 6.05pm and got our booked shuttle bus to the hotel, we also convinced the driver to wait and drive us out to the Gondola that would take us to the Pinnacles Restaurant, which we had booked for dinner. We had a stunning meal surrounded by beautiful views of the lights of Christchurch and ordered a cake for Noeliine with a candle for her birthday tomorrow. It was a great night, a long day and by the time we got back to our rooms we were ready for bed.
