Yesterday we drove from Mt. Cook to Christchurch thorough near constant rain.  It was a long drive, made longer by two lane roads and RVs.  Christchurch is located in Canterbury.  The landscape here couldn’t be more different.  The land is flat, known as the Canterbury Plains, and livestock farming is everywhere.  John Deere tractor and irrigation companies went by with every small farm town we drove through.  It reminded me a lot of middle America, minus the tornados.

The clouds cleared and we spent a fun New Years Eve walking around the central city of Christchurch.  We ate at a pub, drank a milkshake, and were in bed by 11 PM, exhausted.  Ann, the owner of the B&B we’re staying at, made sure to warn us the “gun noise” would be fireworks and not actual guns.  Apparently some Asian guests during Guy Fawkes Day freaked out when they heard what they thought was a gun fight in the street.  Then she said, “Well, aren’t you from America?  I imagine you hear guns all the time.”    

In some ways we’re ending our trip on a down note.  Christchurch was devastated by several major earthquakes, the last of which was roughly four years ago, February 11th, 2011 at 12:51 PM.  It’s a date like 9/11 is for New Yorkers.  Evidence of the earthquake is everywhere.  70% of the buildings are gone, replaced with vacant lots or construction.  Seven out of ten buildings, bulldozed.  Imagine!  But God bless ‘em they are re-building.  Restaurants are opening up again, and the city has a major plans to reimagine itself.  Some say the New Zealand economy won’t fully recover for many years. Hearing Kiwis talk about it, I got a sense the emotional toll will last much, much longer. 

Today, New Years Day, we boarded a train and took a long ride across the country on the Tranzalpine Express.  I spent much of my time on the outdoor viewing area watching the world go by, except in the Otira Tunnel.  It’s something of an engineering marvel.  8.3 km long and quite steep, the tunnel has doors on either side which shut after the train passes by.  Once shut a massive fan starts sucking air out from behind the train. These are diesel locomotives and to keep them from running away down the grade (or chugging up it), they produce a lot of fumes.  It took us 20 minutes to get through.  To keep us protected from carbon monoxide, the train crew locked the doors between cars and disabled the emergency stop button.  

Upon exiting the tunnel you’ve entered another world; the floral and fauna completely change.  Going west what once was arid is now very wet.  Where there was brown, now only green and dense forests.  The tunnel passes under the Southern Alps, which block the rain from falling on the eastern side, known as a rain shadow.  Hence the dryness.  The Rockies do the same thing to the Central Plains, though there are more trees growing on the Canterbury Plains.

The engineer gave me a tour of the locomotive.  No one here is super worried about terrorism, so you can still do stuff like this.  He was an old railroader not far from retirement.  We sat waiting for helper engines to assist us in the Otira Tunnel.  It clearly annoyed him.  He said to me, “We don’t even need the locos, we just haul them down because some bureaucrat and the union want to keep jobs.”  Someone, using safety as his or her reasoning, thought adding three extra locomotives would be prudent in case the one primary locomotive and secondary backup failed … at the same time.  I didn’t have the time to tell him about the unions I work with.   

The train terminates at Greymouth, a mining town on the west coast.  Upon entering the town, a onlooker dropped his pants and let his assets dangle in the breeze as the train went by.  Upon leaving an hour later, another man dropped his pants and featured his posterior for us.  So while nobody really saw much of Greymouth, we did end up seeing more of its citizenry than expected.      

One correction from my last report, Mt. Cook lost its top and shrunk a bit in 1991. 

Happy New Year!