Travel Fox to Greymouth retracing our steps.

We get up, caffeinate, pack — yech, seems like we’re always packing for one reason or another — and drive out of Fox Glacier after Cynthia makes a couple egg salad sandwiches for lunch later. We’re returning north, up the coast road, to take the TransAlpine train tomorrow from Greymouth to Christchurch, which is supposed to offer some beautiful vistas of a variety of landscapes.

The drive is uneventful and unremarkable to note, except that our marriage survives it intact after Cynthia is able to limit herself to telling David to slow down only four times and David … remember who’s writing most of this drivel (drive … drivel … get it?) … allows our car to be passed by three rabbits, two backpackers and a lone cyclist weighed down with two saddlebags the size of washing machines.

We stop for gas and lunch in Hokitika and take a gander at the local church, which we neglected previously in favor of the huhu grubs. We can’t go into the church. We can’t even walk on the grounds because they are chained off. A sign in front of the tall, domed stone structure tells us that the building and grounds are an earthquake hazard and that the church has been closed since 1985. The town has a choice, the sign says, of building a new church, which it estimates would cost two million or to enhance the existing structure for an estimated 1.5 million. Donations for reconstruction may be dropped in the slot on top of a hollow metal post beside the sign. We have seen similar warnings, other shuttered buildings, in small towns all along the west coast of the South Island, and occasionally on the north island.

We push on through intermittent rain to Greymouth where we scope out the train station, the Apex car return — down the block 300 yards. If no one’s at the Apex counter in the station and the car isn’t damaged, just drop the keys in the hole in the countertop — an art gallery (meh), and drive up the side of Greymouth’s single volcanic hill to Ardwyn House, our B&B for the night.

Mary Ardwyn is our hostess. She is no taller than Cynthia, a bit rounder with age, nearing 90, she says, with close cropped gray hair and a frank, welcoming disposition. She offers us tea and coffee and biscuits on a tray in her living room. We chat. She says she is Welsh originally and Cynthia asks her what brought her to New Zealand.

“Ten pounds,” she says. Cynthia and she laugh. I must look as mystified as I feel. “That was how much it cost to sail from home to New Zealand,” she explains. “I came in ‘62, a year before Castro and Kennedy got into that fight. The kiwi government paid everything else: all your fare, your room and board, and gave you a temporary job when you got here … something ‘till you got settled.”

“And your husband?” We ask.

“Died 22 years ago,” she says. “He was a merchant marine when we met but was a commercial fisherman after we were married and moved here, to Greymouth. He went in for his regular check up on a Tuesday and the doctor told him he was right as rain. He had a brain hemorrhage Thursday morning, right after his coffee.”

All this information is just matter of fact. She seems to harbor no sadness. Maybe it’s distant enough in time. Mary is a rock. And we will come to hear more about her tomorrow.

Another day of many miles in Paradise.