Greymouth to Franz Josef

We were picked up from Paradiso by an older driver (in his 60s) who said he was a fill-in driver because the real Magic bus driver's house had been flooded with the rain. Straight away I noticed the Brummie accent and he seemed quite offended when I guessed he was from Birmingham. He told us he had lived in NZ for 37 years and seemed to do his best to cover his Brummie with a bit of Kiwi but failed dreadfully. When I asked him why he had chosen to come and live in NZ, he said it was for the weather. So I asked again. 'So why did you choose NZ?' I think he is New Zealand's number one fan. Tony (the driver) stopped at lots of places on the way to Greymouth (our destination) for us to take photos and go on walks, meaning that a journey should have taken 5 hours actually took about 10. We stopped at the panckake rocks, which are rocks that look like stacked up pancakes, and we also stopped at a seal colony, which was actually quite interesting (and free!) to see the seals everywhere. We made friends with another Japanese boy (Tomo k) and a German girl who we shared a room with in Greymouth. Greymouth is meant to be like the Rotheram of the UK; not much to see and do. Except, we chose a hostel that had unlimited free wifi(!!!) so, after going for a walk around the town with Tomo k and Marike, we went on an internet marathon, getting to bed around 2am, which wasn't good because we had to be up at 6 for the bus the next day and we had booked ourselves in for a glacier hike. Burning the candle at both ends had commenced.