The Big Deluge

(Hi, it's Josele again; I'll be in charge of updating the blog today)

After yesterday's mega-exhausting Wanaka-Makarora trip (with constant head winds of 20-30 kmh), we were a bit afraid of today's bike stage: 80km. between Makarora and Haast on the west coast. The weather forecast was rain the whole day, and we knew we had to go over Haast Pass, climbing a bit more than 300 meters from our starting point.

Well, the weather forecast was quite accurate, and we were battered the whole 80km. by 3-6 mm. of unending rain. I've never been so soaked in my whole life!

On the other hand, the rain made the road emptier and thus safer than previous days (we avoided all the "extreme" adventurers of New Zealand) and the trip was beautiful, with hundreds of small to medium size waterfalls dotting the mountains that surround the river Haast (along which we biked most of the day). A pity it was raining so much that I could not use my camera to take some pictures, as the landscape was amazing (the light for taking photos not so much, though).

Also, we made it up the pass in record time... actually, we did it so fast that we only realised we had climbed the Haast Pass when we saw the signpost, so our moods went quite high when we realised what we had achieved! It appears that the previous biking days have increased our endurance with the bike.

After that, our bike guide described the road as "gently undulating" which in JL Blasco's means "neverending up-slopes"... you see, he is the king of the flat and the downhill, and whenever we had 1km+ of this kind of road I quickly lost him of sight, to find him a bit later puffing and swearing while climbing a slope (clearly, I'm the climber of the group; specially now that he has lost his left foot cleat)... My favourite two phrases of the day from him were:
1.- "damn... the uphill slopes are always longer than the downhill ones!", which absolutely makes sense in the temporal dimension though, in this particular case, not in the space dimension (this one goes specially for those who have seen Airbag and remember the scene with the "Guardia Civil").
2.- "when I arrive in Wellington, I'll go to the Minister of Highway Building and throw my bike at them"... this said of course while cursing and puffing up an uphill slope... :))

Anyway, we somehow managed to arrive in Haast in two hours less than we originally foresaw. Soaked to the bone as we were, we decided to go for a room a bit more cozy than in previous days... after the camping in Makarora it feels quite decadent.

The specialty food in Haast is whitebait, a fish caught in the area, which we plan to taste tomorrow (we'll buy whitebait sandwiches, which apparently are relatively famous in the region, or so says the Lonely Planet)... Another thing for which Haast is renowned in New Zealand is its gemstone industry, started already by the Maoris long time ago. Some of the gemstones found in the region are "endemic" of New Zealand and thus can only be mined in this area.

Tomorrow we'll start the last two stages of our approach to Fox Glacier. It should be an easy 55-60km. mostly flat trip to Lake Paringa (weather forecast says it'll be sunny with some clouds and almost no wind... I hope they are right), where we will camp and ready ourselves for the final stage to the West Coast Glaciers.

By the way, Internet and mobile services in Haast are almost non-existent, so I'll have to wait to Fox Glacier to publish more photos in the blog.