Up early once again, I headed up to Barrytown for the day to find this knife making place I had googled online. Barrytown is about 20 minutes to the north of Greymouth and very easy to overlook if you don't know what you're looking for. I had heard of this knife making place though, and was determined to track it down. It was not currently raining, but the skies were threatening so I didn't want to caught out in the wet again. I found the place about 8:30.
Misty. Barrytown is also right on the Tasman sea. At the knife making place, the owners, Robyn and Steven were very sweet. They moved out of the city to retire and started this as a tourist business. They work 6 days a week upon request and have every Monday off to go into town. Their property was large, backed right up against the mountains. They had horses, ponies, sheep, cows and a couple dogs, one named Fluff a very cute white puffy puppy. Other people began arriving about 9 and we started things shortly thereafter.
we started completely from scratch, each handed a rod of steel (NZ made of course) and began the heating and forging of our blades, hard work but a lot of fun working with orange-hot metal!
[one of the other girls got some good pics for me]
We finished all the rough assembly before lunch, adding brass and a wooden handle then breaked for salami toasties and fresh fruit & tea for lunch. It was interesting to hear about the other people there. There was a couple from Germany, a couple from the UK now living in Christchurch studying the effects of earthquakes, a lady there by herself because her husband wanted to do a day-hike instead of making a knife (psh, crazy) and several others. Everyone was very nice and eager to get back to work. After lunch we started the finishing process, sanding and shaping, polishing and sharpening the blades, then staining the wooden handled and by 4pm we were finished, throwing axes and taking pictures. Robyn also took us around the farm to feed some of the horses and swing on the giant log swing they had built.
Steven made fun of me for my blade. He says women are always the ones to make the weapons. I like it, I think it turned out well. Good luck to me trying to get it through customs now 0:)
A great day activity, lots of smiles and lot of fun. We all got special made cardboard holders to take them home in or to mail.
I headed back into Greymouth for the evening and thought I'd check out the town's Brewery for the evening. Greymouth was known as a brewing town for may years, and their brand, Monteith's, is currently NZ's #1 beer. I figured I'd take the tour and give it a try.
The place was packed when I got there. Our tour guide was an ex-parole officer. She was not the most friendly person, and was not very knowledgeable about the company. She would get upset at the tourists when they asked questions she didn't know the answers to (which was most of them) but I found the whole thing quite funny. I popped out to visit the museum attached to the brewery to get caught up on the history.
They started as the Westland Brewery when the company still worked with Hokitika. But after the great depression, things kind of crashed for a while and both towns had a hard time recovering. Monteith's eventually emerged and is now flourishing in Greymouth and supplying beer to all of NZ and Australia.
My tour came with 4 tasting beers, I tried their summer ale, but was pretty disappointed. It had no depth, tasted like cheep beer or beer-flavored water. I was sad face, but thought I'd try another brew. I really liked the design of the place (the menu had a good font!) so I decided to stay.
I tried the apricot wheat beer next, delicious apricot flavor but still terrible beer. I tried to order some chips (fries) to hang around longer, but they said they kitchen was not taking orders at that time from being too backed up. I looked around at the 50 people or so in the restaurant, then back at the bartender, then decided to leave, a bit in disbelief.
I headed back to the hostel and left my 2 free beer coupons in the community voucher box and gave my other free beer coupon (for a local restaurant) to the lady at the front desk. She was excited at least. After that, I had another pasta dinner then found my way back to the comfy couch by the fire to spend the evening reading nature and explorer magazines before headed to bed.
When I got back to my room I found this note
Ha, I thought it was nice since I had probably woken her up when I left in the morning. The most words she said to me, in a note.
I spent the night alone in the room and had a good rest once again.
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