Day 6: Tuesday 3rd December
We left Franz Josef in pouring rain. It had continued with heavy rain and gusts of wind throughout the night and it then persisted heavily all day on the journey to Arthur’s Pass. I had had little sleep that night worrying if we would be able to get to Arthur’s Pass or whether the road would be blocked by landslides. Luckily the road wasn’t too bad. This day was to be one of our longest drives. We followed the coast stopping for the toilet by Lake Ianthe where we spotted our first Weka just walking around outside the toilets.
We carried on until, following a track down from Ross Beach Road, we pulled up as the road ended at the beach and had our picnic lunch. It was at times like these when the weather was cooler, dull and wet outside that we were thankful we had brought a flask with us so we could have nice cup of hot tea!
We continued on and fortunately there was very little traffic. We could see there was beautiful scenery but it was just too wet to stop.
We pulled up a couple of times to try to take a photo but really couldn’t see anything and got soaked in the process. We arrived at Arthur’s Pass Alpine Motel at about 3.00 pm. It was a nice spot and a small motel with only about 8 cabins run by a very pleasant couple. We had a friendly chat with them as we signed in and they told us that they were shortly to be travelling to London to visit their son and family. They had a lot of knowledge of the area around Arthur’s Pass and were obviously keen on wildlife and conservation as the chap was a volunteer for the area. The cabins were slightly old fashioned but they were clean, comfortable and warm and we had everything we needed. We sat looking out at the weather and every time the rain looked like it was easing a little, within a couple of minutes it was pouring again. In the end we thought we would bite the bullet, so on with the waterproof jackets, hoods up and we set off. Well it turned out to be a somewhat hilarious walk! There was a footpath but it led downhill and it had just turned into a river going right over the top of my shoes! Walking in this weather was probably rather mad, we made it down to see the Arthur’s Pass Station and then decided enough was enough and went back to our cabin where I removed my two pairs of soaking wet socks and jeans and tried to dry them by the heater. ( Again waterproof trousers would have been useful!)
We had hoped to spot Keas as these rare alpine parrots are often seen in the area. To the locals they are actually quite annoying as they will peck at and ruin anything and for tourists they are likely to damage your hire car by pecking off the rubber around the car windows. The weather must have been too bad even for the Kea as we never saw any.
We cobbled together some supper, I wrote some postcards and we settled in to watch a film from their collection. This was a nice touch that they had a fairly extensive library of DVDs you could borrow. They are probably used to the bad weather. Score for this accommodation I will give 9/10.
We had seen the weather forecast and there was to be no let up in the rain over on the west. In fact we had been lucky to get through as the road had been closed before Fox Glacier after we had gone through and the TranzAlpine train had been cancelled . People were in fact stranded over by Franz Josef for 5 days before they were escorted through. One day later and all our plans would have been in turmoil!