Back to Christchurch

I'm back from my road trip of the south island. I arrived back at my flat this evening, tired, with a headache, sick of carrying my luggage, much poorer, and absolutely thrilled to have had such an amazing trip. PJ and I took a shuttle early this morning from Fox Glacier to Greymouth, which is a port city on the west coast. We spent a few hours in Greymouth, toured the train station and the Subway next door and then caught the Tranz Alpine scenic train from Greymouth back to Christchurch.

Now bear with me while I go on a momentary tangent about New Zealand weather patterns. I promise it'll all make sense in a minute (or at least I hope so...) Usually wind blows from west to east, coming in off the Tasman Sea and carrying quite a bit of the Tasman sea with it. The wind then hits the mountains and has to rise to get over them. The air cools, all the water from the Tasman condenses. The result is something called rain. You may have heard of it before; we experienced quite a bit of it on the west coast... Once all the rain has fallen on the west coast, the dry wind goes over the mountain and the east coast gets a dry, windy day with a few scattered clouds and usually a lot more sunshine than Vermont.

Anyway, today we saw just that sort of weather. It was rainy and grey in Greymouth (bad pun, sorry) and the expensive scenic ride was less than scenic because all the scenic mountains were in the clouds. However, once we crossed the mountains, there was suddenly a moment when everyone noticed the sunshine. By the time we reached Christchurch on the east coast, it was a glorious evening. Anyway, the lack of obscuring clouds made the trip much more scenic and hopefully there will be pictures to follow. Unfortunately, I have to wait until I can steal PJ's pictures because my camera died (again). All the rain on Fox Glacier didn't really agree with it. C'est la vie.