ON THE BUSES

DAY 33: Christchurch to Franz Josef

Today we joined our Stray Travel bus which will be our means of transport for the next 10 days or so.

After a chilly start we boarded a mini coach that would take us over the mountains from Christchurch in the East to meet our Stray bus in Greymouth in the West, passing through the beautiful Arthur's Pass. We stopped for a cup of tea here and finally the sun decided to come out. As we were looking up at the mountain snow, beaming in the sunshine, these huge prehistoric parrot-like birds arrived outside. They were beautifully coloured, a sort of dark autumnal green with a vibrant red under-wing. However, they did look a bit menacing, and a bit arrogant. A bit of a 'I want a bit of your sandwich and there aint much you can do about it' kind of attitude. They even started eating the rubber trim from the car windows. They like that apparently.

After a winding, scenic drive down the other side of the mountains we hit Greymouth where we would have to wait for about an hour (two in the end) for our Stray bus. So we had a subway for lunch, stocked up on food supplies at the supermarket and waited around in the sun for our bus.

When it finally arrived it was quite packed but the people onboard were so friendly and nice and everyone seemed to be getting along well. We found the only two seats next to each other near the back of the bus where we befriended a few English people; Josh and Lisa (a really lovely couple from Hampshire), Laura from Essex and some others who had been on the same bus together for a few weeks.

We spent the first hour or so getting to know each other, sharing stories of where we'd been and what we'd done, before we pulled in to a Jade carving place in Hokitika. We had a cuppa and a look around before we commenced our journey again.

The journey was becoming quite bumpy by this stage and everyone was feeling a bit of motion sickness. It didn't help by us facing the wrong way to talk to people.

Having pre-booked our dorm rooms at the Rainforest Retreat on the bus, as everyone did, there was a huge queue to check in when we arrived at Franz Josef. But it soon went down and being one of the last to check in meant we benefited from getting a 4-bed en suite dorm all to ourselves. Bonus!

After we made some soup in the kitchen, we used the internet and hit the sack after a long day's travelling.