What is it with people not having consideration for others sleeping between the hours of midnight and 6am!!
Late arrivals last night around 1.30am - why do I know the time? Because the f***ers made the loudest noise for about 20 minutes in and out of their bags, zipping them up and down, banging through the toilet door, dropping their chargers or what ever it was on the floor boards. I was literally so close to swearing and throwing something at them! Then they had a conversation about an alarm for the morning... oh they didn’t need to worry about that because guess who’s going to be their alarm in the morning! ME!

6.30am, I was indeed successful at waking the little s***s up aswell, I sprayed my deodorant and made sure Ellie did that too. I brushed my teeth on my bed, I whoops! Accidentally on purpose dropped my shoes and I couldn’t decide whether I wanted my bag open or shut (Times 4, zippppp!). You know you’ve accomplished your goals when they’re staring down at you from their bunk beds with that look of disgust. Ohhh, two can play at that game boys!

Ahh, with a sense of accomplishment already this morning; we walked the ghost town over to the tranz alpine train station for board our train.

The train seemed very poosh, it had a cafe and lovely big windows around to the ceiling, lots of leg room and headphones for audio description of the areas we were travelling through.

Pretty sure we were the only young people on the train though, we weee on the golden oldies tour again! (With the feeling you were in China... if you know what I mean!)

Beautiful weather, beautiful scenery, all until we got into those damn southern alps. As the forecast said there was 70% chance of light rain, that was in fact 100% correct. The rain began, such a shame because the scenery was so lovely! Luckily New Zealand’s scenery isn’t always spoilt by the rain because it still looks awesome in it.

We reached Arthur’s pass and my god was it raining! Holy crap bags! I hadn’t seen rain like this in over two years, it was bouncing off the floor! And the wind was making it come down a lot quicker than usual so that it felt like bullets hitting you.
We couldn’t hold off under the shelter for very long so we made a run for it under the subway pass and up to the visitors centre, all about 100-200 metres away and we were already wet down to our pants. Fantastic! I couldn’t manage to fit under any of the Asian umbrellas so we got wettest.

The visitors centre was a little caravan cabin, a few people already in there asking about the walks. We thought if it eased a little we could go walk the devils punch bowl waterfall which was the smallest walk but the guides told us that that was probably already impossible to do without walking through ankle to shin deep water because the creeks you have to pass would already be flooded. Bloody great! So all the walks were out of the question and the only bus going back to christchurch was at 3pm... it was 11am!
Most people were going onwards to Greymouth via the bus because the train lines to there had been closed because of landslide. So we planned our route at the centre, first we would run another 200metres and take shelter in the chapel... chapels freak me out and always smell funky so a quick stop for a photo of the waterfall you could see from inside out the back window before legging it over to the pub before our feet burnt.

Not the most welcoming of guests, I swear the one woman was the wicked witch of the north giving us that famous state up and down and not saying anything apart from trying that Elvis lip (which she hadn’t quite mastered like me.)

Too early for a drink so a pot of tea to warm us up, Ellie was freezing because her feet were soaking in her trainers. When it was time for a drink, we got ID’d (challenge 25, yesss!) only I didn’t get served because my passport the one that’s run out of pages but not expired is no longer valid so she wouldn’t accept it as ID, the first person in 5 weeks to not accept it. Not that she was nice about it, she was extremely hostile and rude as if I was committing a felony. She even took it out to her manager to look at, it’s not fake love don’t panic.
Then they tried to say they can’t take it anyways because it’s a foreign passport... I couldn’t help myself by asking them what the rules are in Arthur’s pass because in every other part of the country if I haven’t got a New Zealand drivers license then you have to show your FORIEGN passport. Hmm, yup I was correct.

Oh well, not to panic! At least I look young enough to be challenged for ID. I’m sure she was just upset that she wouldn’t be challenged for ID. Not that I didn’t have another two pieces of ID with me to show that I was 27 and pretty sure there wasn’t going to be any police officer in their right mind walking into this pub in the middle of nowhere today, but hey ho! Keeps me from drinking and on my streak 9 days sober! Haha.

We went over to the cafe on the other side of the road and had coffee, played cards and watched the rain. The Kea birds (the big green parrots that take food and belongings from you, basically the New Zealand’s version of a longleat monkey).

It had not stopped raining all day, not even to slow down a little bit. The roads were flooding, the streams were almost full it was crazy rain up here! We were getting cabin fever and the loopy/senile bug had sunk in.
Luckily we checked our ticket before we got up to leave for the bus station in the rain because we would have been in the wrong place and extremely wet again! The bus was picking us up from outside the cafe in the middle of this little town! Woooohoooo!

We still got extremely wet crossing the road though, the little minibus was comfy and dark and there was only 6 of us on it. Finally time to leave and get back down to the sunshine in Christchurch!

After about one hour it was as though we were in a different country, there was blue skies, the roads weren’t even wet. Bloody typical! After being dropped off at the train station we even got hot walking back to the hostel it was that warm.

We sat in the garden to catch the last of the sun, warm the bones and dry the clothes a little! Then in the conservatory where it was like a greenhouse before watching Netflix and having a late shower.

Next stop tomorrow Kaikoura!