On Monday morning, we left Christchurch, which is on the east coast of the South Island, a little bit north of center, to take a trip on the TranzAlpine Railway. The train left Christchurch at 8:15 a.m. and arrived in Greymouth, which is on the west coast almost due west of Christchurch, at 1:10 p.m. The train is solely a tourist train, so it is built with large windows to take advantage of the incredible views as you pass over (and through–there are several long tunnels) the Southern Alps. It is known as one of the most beautiful train rides in the world, and it lived up to that reputation. Wow, is New Zealand beautiful!!!

Once we got to Greymouth, we picked up a surprisingly nice rental car with heated leather seats and drove about 2.5 hours to Franz Josef, where we will stay for two nights.

Unfortunately, as you can see from the photos, our good weather luck ran out today and it started to rain about 3 hours into our train trip and rained for our entire drive. Even worse, this is the forecast for tomorrow:

This must be why they call this the Wet Coast of NZ.

The reason for coming to Franz Josef is to see the two glaciers near here, the Franz Josef Glacier and the Fox Glacier, and to hike in the mountains to various lookouts. All you can see now is fog, so we might not get to see the glaciers or do much hiking. We have had such great weather for the past two months, so we were bound to get rained out at some point.

We had an early dinner in the tiny town of Franz Josef and checked into our hotel, which has a great view of the fog covering the mountain. The foggy mountain is beautiful in its own way.

Oh, and in town, the public bathrooms have a ten minute timer–after ten minutes and a warning bell, the door will unlock automatically. Rich’s played music (Frank Sinatra) for him; mine, sadly, did not. I had heard about these bathrooms on a podcast. They are designed to keep people from sleeping in them (in cities) or trying to take sink showers in them (in backpacking areas), thus tying them up for long periods of time. Who would’ve thought I’d see them in rural New Zealand!