Westland weather

We woke up this morning in what felt more like a lake than the tent we usually sleep in. It has been pouring down like crazy all night and still is actually. We thought we were lucky enough to miss the worst of the so famous Westland weather, but today we were caught in the middle of it. The massive rainstorm made it impossible for us to even try to cook our traditional oatmeal brekkie. We had to leave immediately. All day, it's been raining and hailing horizontally due to the 40+ km/h northwesterlies. It was some very exhausting 60km to get to Hokitika. I now know not to underestimate the NZ weather because it can be devastating.

Anyway, soaked as we were we managed to find ourselves a hostel for the night, where we are going to celebrate our 3 months away from home by cooking some good food and watch an awful lot of movies! I sincerely hope that the following days will have some nicer weather in store for us, but what can you really do about it.

Westland

About a week have passed since we left Queenstown behind! Not only did we have an amazing time there, but also did we meet a whole bunch of awesome people to spend those fourteen days with! However, after two weeks of beer drinking it's been quite pleasant to be back on the road again. The first day from Queenstown we figured we would take the short way to Wanaka over the mountain pass, but changed our mind as soon as we realized how steep it would be. So we took the detour which was the by far best alternative, two days of beautiful scenery and "mostly" downhill roads along vineyards and clearblue rivers took us to Wanaka. From Wanaka we started heading north towards our forth province, Westland.

The ride from Wanaka to Haast at the coast was by far the most scenic one so far during our month-long trip. For about 100km were we accompanied by the outlandishly blue lakes and the snow covered mountaintops. It all seemed so unreal and we felt very grateful to be able to witness this natural wonder. The profile of the ride however was perhaps not the easiest one. A LOT of steep ups and downs made us quite exhausted, but the will to keep on going still made us push through it and the gorgeous landscape did ofcourse play its part.

We went from the grazelands of the interior country, through the dense rainforests, over the exhausting Haast-pass only to emerge at the coast with the roaring surf welcoming us. No words can describe the feeling. It didn't take too long for our mood to change though when we discovered our new worst enemy, SANDFLIES. What these tiny creatures lack in comparison to mosquitos, they make up in sheer numbers. I'd gladly live accompanied by mosquitos for the rest of my life as long as I would never meet another sandfly again!
After another two days along the pretty Tasman sea coastline we made our way to Fox glacier, and decided to go for a hike the following day. However the next day, for some reason the weather gods decided to dump an incredible amount of water upon us. We still did the trek and no matter how soaked we got, we enjoyed the shit out of it. Johan felt like he could stay up there forever, but I'd rather not.

After the trek we got on the bikes again, only to ride the toughest hills we've done so far. The 25km ride from Fox glacier to Franz Joseph contained three massive hills that would make Lance Armstrong stop to catch his breath. Although, now that we're down in Franz Joseph we feel pretty good about ourselves. The plan for now is to get to Nelson and catch up with Jack and the Hamburgers for Christmas. Supposedly Nelson has the best weather in the whole country... I reckon we deserve that after theese rainfalls.

Now it's time to keep scrathing our sandfly bites, nasty buggars.

See you soon!