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KATIE
I feel like we should be boarding Noah's Ark, it's been pretty much 2 days now of solid, torrential rain. I don't think I've ever seen so much rain in such a short space of time, England and even Wales isn't a patch on this!! Luckily, until this morning it's not really stopped us doing anything so can't complain! So this morning we're updating the blog instead of doing a nice 3 hour walk, some would say that was a good thing.....
Puzzling World was great, such a different idea to anywhere I've heard of before, the room you first enter is attached to a cafe and has loads of tables each with about 4 or 5 puzzles on it. James had a pretty good go at one of them, I failed miserably at 2 others and gave up to drink my coffee. James is convinced I am now obsessed with coffee, I'm not - I just need one in the morning, and I'd made it to about 10.30am so I thought I was doing pretty well actually. Coffee drunk, we made our way to the illusion rooms which are really clever. There are all sorts of different things from holograms, to walls that look skew whiff but are actually straight, to 3-D effect pictures and whole rooms that look normal but aren't. It was a bit like being in the middle of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory where the walls all close in as they walked down the corridor! One of the best bits is a room covered in faces, all concave until you cover one eye and move around. Not only do the faces become convex but the eyes and whole heads move around as you move sideways, up and down. Very bizarre! The weirdest room is the tilted room in which there's a snooker table, chair and water that seem to roll upwards - it really screws with your balance though!! Having freaked ourselves out enough we made our way out to the maze, 2 storeys with 4 bridges - we found the 4 corners in 30 mins so we were very pleased with ourselves, until it took us a further 30 mins to find the exit. Not so clever now eh?
Next on the list was the drive to Franz Josef via Fox Glacier. By this time the rain has started pouring down, so as you can see from the few photos, it wasn't really the weather for walking long distances! Had a quite look at Fox Glacier but you can't get really close and we were getting pretty wet so it was a whistle stop tour and back in the car to drive the rest of the way. The rain didn't let up at all, so we made a mad dash to the Blue Ice Cafe for some well earned beers and food and crossed our fingers that the half day glacier tour we'd booked for the next morning wouldn't be cancelled - today's tours had all be called off. As we listened to the rain pouring down overnight we weren't hopeful....
Morning came and although you still couldn't see the sky for the mass of cloud, it wasn't raining (yet) so the tour was on. Once again we got ourselves trussed up in strange kit, but this time a whole lot cooler looking than the Sydney Bridge climb outfit. The tour company provided boots, waterproof trousers, gore-tex rain jackets, hat, gloves and crampons so pretty well kitted out! The usual valley walk to the glacier was changed to their 'alternative route' which involved a serious trek through rain forest - much of the way being assisted by ropes etc to pull yourselves up and down on. Great fun, and not for the unfit I imagine. We managed to get ourselves in the quicker of the 2 groups for the climb to the glacier and spent a while grappling with attaching crampons to our boots before following our guide Anthony (equipped with Ice pick to carve nice foot holes for us in the ice - how very kind of him...) up the glacier and through some very surreal and beautiful crevasses. The ice is really blue up close, but apparently is much more blue in the winter when the ice is more dense. Walking on the glacier was great, and I'm so glad we did it. It started raining part of the way through and by the time we finished it was tipping down once again, we were fortunate to have been on the morning trip, can't imagine the afternoon one would have been as much fun! We were all soaked by the end but it was a great experience and one I'd definitely recommend.
Stayed in the best hostel ever in Greymouth for the evening, Global Village, absolutely wicked. Great kitchen, nice fire, huge room and bathrooms you don't have to go outside for, very impressed! Best thing about Greymouth actually, there's not a lot going on here!!!
JAMES
The rain, Oh My God, the rain! Apart from a couple of hours on the Glacier, it just hasn't stopped since we left Wanaka 48hrs ago! I think the whole Polar Ice Cap must have melted over the last two days and been dumped in its entirety on the West Coast of New Zealand! At least Greymouth is living up to its name - its' certainly Grey this morning!
Only a quick entry from me today as we are going to have to brave the rain in a minute to go and catch the train to Christchurch. The 4 hour trip across the Southern Alps is supposed to be one of the world's most spectacular train journeys. If we see any of it through the rainclouds!
The trek onto the Glacier yesterday was wicked. The volume of grey rocks and boulders at the snout is incredible, all of it carved out from the valley as the glacier advances. The power of it is incredible, especially as it advanced 2.5km in 11 years between 1985 and 1996, almost a metre a day!! Once you are up on top of the glacier itself, the ice is really blue, not that it came out too well on our dodgy camera. We spent about an hour and a half on the ice, including going through a couple of tight crevasses, which was pretty cool. You wouldn't want to be in one if the ice suddenly moved, you'd be crushed in a second! As Katie said, good job we weren't on the afternoon tour, as by the time we were coming down, so was the rain! The bus back to the village smelt like a very wet dog! Nice...
The hostel last night was the best yet, more like a boutique hotel - albeit without the en suite, but really nicely decorated and with a fantastic kitchen, which we made full use of cooking ourselves some gourmet (?) pasta and tomato sauce!!
Spending the night in Christchurch tonight and then taking an early train to Kaikoura, the whale watching capital of New Zealand. At this rate we won't need to do the boat trip though, they'll be swimming down the High Street!!
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