THE population heartland of the South Island’s West Coast lies in the area around Greymouth and Westport, where mines in the hills are joined with a comparative abundance of flat land by West Coast standards.

The plain sits west of the South Island’s gigantic Alpine Fault: a crack in the earth’s crust that runs southwest like a ruler to Fiordland, in a way that is very striking on a topopgraphical map. The coastal plain to the west of the fault is nowhere else as wide as it is in the vicinity of Greymouth. Which is, therefore, the biggest town on the South Island’s West Coast, with its base hospital and other facilities.

Centred on Greymouth, the Grey District, also known as Māwhera, calls itself ‘The Heart of the Coast’. However, that slogan could be extended to include Westport and also Hokitika, a little further south of Greymouth. Very few people on the West Coast live outside this area, though the Coast stretches for hundreds of kilometres.

I say quite a lot about the Hokitika area in my earlier West Coast blog post called ‘Green Jungles and Waters of Jade’, so I don’t need to talk about Hokitika in this post.

Between Westport and Greymouth, there is also the isolated finger of mountains known as the Paparoa: these days, Paparoa National Park. I’ll do a post on those mountains shortly, and separately.

In this post, I’ll describe a road trip from north to south, starting at Westport and travelling southward past the incredible coastal wonders of Fox River and Punakaiki, to Greymouth and then on to Lake Brunner/Moana and the former Brunner coal mine.

Original blog post: a-maverick.com/blog/greymouth-and-westport-the-heart-of-the-coast