Fancy dress

The group of people you leave Nelson with are stuck with you for 3 night and 4 days because two of the stops down the West coast are in the middle of nowhere with not a lot to do. Thankfully I got on really well with nearly everyone on our bus and made genuine friendships with people most of whom I will never see again.

From Westport the bus takes you to the poo pub where for the last 14 years everyone who travels with the Kiwi bus has a barbecue cooked by the 84 year old landlord and then gets in to fancy dress for a party. Our theme was what you want to be when you grow up which left a lot of scope to pretty much go as anything my personal favourite was Northern Irish Pete who was going to go as a terrorist. The journey to the poo pub stops at some impressive rock formations called pancake rocks that look a bit like stacks of pancakes. It next stops at Greymouth for some cheap shops to stock up on fancy dress supplies, most people stretching the theme to fit around what they could buy for less than $5, all part of the fun. I went as Batman using some cutting and colouring in skills that turned out reasonably well.

The barbecue was great consisting of a huge steak, delicious venison stew and a mountain of potatoes and vegetables, a much needed stomach lining for the evening's drinking. After dinner we took our jugs of beer down to the beach to watch the sunset and let our food digest then it was party time.

The night was a lot of fun and all seemed to end far too quickly. I did act like a bit of a nob at one point because a Dutch man called William was pissing everyone off and making a lot of people, particularly any young girls, feel uncomfortable. I'd had a few so I told him what I thought and I'm not proud of it but what I said was (in edited form) 'William you're an arse, no-one here likes you, why don't you go home'. Because he was so drunk I don't think he really understood and thankfully Les, the landlord kicked him out minutes later saying pretty much what I'd said.

Gradually numbers dwindled starting with the Scandinavians, then the Dutch, the Germans, the Canadians until there were only a few of us left mostly the English and Irish. We decanted a bottle of wine in to a plastic bottle and went back to the beach to end the night where me and Irish Ollie had a swim in the sea, a bloody silly idea for obvious reasons. We survived, mainly thanks to northerner Roxy arriving and telling us off and soon left the beach for our beds.