escape from the horror that is rain!

Strangely enough I slept quite alright, but in the middle of the night everything became so quite that I suddenly woke up. It seemed that the rain had finally stopped and with a smile on my face I went back to sleep. Little did I know of course what was going to happen in the next few hours and believe it or not, a little bit after 6 AM, it started to rain again, my god, does it ever stop ????

Lots of us wanted to do the heli-hike excursion to Fox Glacier and secretly I already knew that it was going to be cancelled, but there was still a chance that we could walk up to the glacier, sadly enough not in this weather though. If it kept on raining in the morning, even the walk up was going to be cancelled and now that it started to rain again, all hope was gone. The one thing that went through my mind at that moment was the fact that I hated rain!

I don’t mind so much that it rains on other days, but one of the reasons I really wanted to come to NZ was for the Tongariro crossing (cancelled), Fox glacier (cancelled) and now my only hope is set on Milfourd Sound. Knowing my luck, this is going to be in the rain as well, I am sure of it. I really don’t know what I have done to deserve this but hey, that’s destiny for you I guess?

As we meet up with the rest of the group for breakfast, it is soon enough clear to everyone that we aren’t going to the glacier, after all, it is really raining cats and dogs and the conclusion of everyone is to get the hell out of this miserable place. Nope, it doesn’t look like I am going to have happy memories of Fox Glacier, it really is a pity.

When everything is loaded into the bus, it is time for us to leave and we all wanted to get out of here as soon as possible but because we left earlier than planned, Helen and Craig had to come up with alternatives. Not that this is easy with such weather, but hey, at least they tried to cheer us all up.

About one hour into the drive and a few floods later (I am not exaggerating, we quite literally had to drive on the other side of the road), we arrived at the information centre of Haast. This was the ideal stop for a toilet break and it also had a small interactive museum about the fauna and flora of the region we were in. Of course we couldn’t stay there for days, so after about half an hour, we were back on the road again only to stop again at one of the many road cafe's we came across.

With a delicious chai latte in the hand, we were on the move again, only to have another stop about half an hour later. We were near the Thunder Creek falls, which is supposed to be a very beautiful place and the home of a fairy. According to Helen, she is called abcde (spoken abcidee). This fairy rewards only the good people at the fall. If you look closely at the waterfall for about 12 seconds at a fixed point, something magical is going to happen. And although it rained so hard that it was difficult to concentrate, I finally got rewarded,, so it seems that I was a good person after all. For the more sober people amongst us, the optical illusion is the fact that the mountains seemed to move. Am I now a bad person by telling this ???

Suddenly it started to rain even harder and we had to make a run for it, I am so glad that we were leaving for Queenstown today, coz they promised us better weather on the other side of the mountain and in a way that was true coz once we left them behind, we were sort of rid of the pooring rain.

I guess it must haven been about 2 hours later when we arrived at the little town of Wanaka, which is also known for its lake. At the moment we arrived, the sun was shining so bright that we all got so excited and happy at the same time. It had been a few days since we saw this round yellow thing and some of us were even wondering how it looked like.

This stop was also going to be our place to have some lunch and what is not to like when you can eat with such nice weather. Me and Tania tried to find a spot on a terrace to enjoy the sunrays but as soon as we got our food, dark clouds were hovering over the city, please go away!!!!!

Sadly enough they wouldn’t go away, but luckily we had eaten already and as soon as we left the terrace, it started drizzling again. This is always a bad omen and by the time we left an ice-cream parlor (what is a person without a dessert), it was raining cats and dogs again. It clearly was written in stone that today was going to be a shitty day!!

Back on the road again, we only had a few hours of driving left and we arrived at Queenstown with the sun in our backs. That yellow thing that is sometimes hovering high in the sky was finally back and as soon as we checked in to our room, me and Tania went into town to have a look around.

Tonight we had a free dinner and since tomorrow we were going to do some adrenaline activities (especially Tania), we wanted to have one last good meal. Since we both like Mexican food so much, we decided to go with it and tried out a cute restaurant which looked very good. We even ordered a margarita as an aperitif, because after all, if we were going to die tomorrow, we at least had one last good meal together.

A little tipsy, we went back to our room again, but not before we had one last stop at the Ferg bakery for a dessert. The choice of the day was lemon Meringue and one thing is for sure, it was delicious.

The perfect ending for a dinner, after all, it could be our last!

It is already way after 9 PM when we started to organize our stuff we needed for tomorrow and after a long hot shower it was time for me to hit the sack. It was going to be an early night coz tomorrow morning Tania had to jump out of an airplane. I on the other hand could sleep in and that was just what I needed because it was going to be a stressful afternoon all together.