May 23, 2014

May 23, 2014

Today we woke up to pouring rain. This was the day we were going to go see the glaciers. We hoped that the rain would stop or become intermittent, but this wasn’t the case. As we drove about 1.5 hours out of the 2 hours it would take to get to the glaciers, we noticed a sign that said “Haast Pass Closed All Day”. We thought that strange so I looked up what that meant and it was the road that we needed to take to get from the west coast to Queenstown. I looked up the closure on the New Zealand public roads website and there had been a rock slide that closed down the road and they weren’t even going to reevaluate it until the next day.  We worried that we could get to the closure, spend the night, and then it would not be reopened. We would have to travel all the way back to where we started and take an alternate route. Since it was so grey, cloudy, and rainy, we knew we wouldn’t be able to see the glaciers anyway so we decided to turn around and go back the 1.5 hours that we had just driven. I found another road (Arthur’s Pass) on the map that would pass us through the mountains and to the east coast. We started driving up this road. Matt noticed two campervans flash their lights at us and then a bus was stopped in the middle of the road. The driver gave us a no-go sign. We kept driving, but I checked the website and it said this road had suddenly closed too due to rock slides. We had to turn around and head back to Greymouth. We had now driven 5 hours and were right back where we had started at 8am. It was still pouring rain and we had gotten nowhere! We started to worry about the next road we were going to try. We asked some locals about it and they said this road was rarely closed due to rock slides so we hightailed it out of Greymouth and started on the Lewis Pass road. The winds were rough and the rain was coming in sideways. It was terrible weather, especially in a campervan. Matt did an excellent job driving and the kids did a great job not complaining. We finally made it into dry Christchurch 10 hours after we started driving this morning. Unbelievable! We are really thankful that we were safe and that we made it over to the east coast. If we hadn’t been able to take this final road, we would have had to drive all the way to the top of the island and driven the entire coast. We would have never made it south of Christchurch if we would have had to do that. We heard from people in Christchurch that the rock slides were all over the news and that the horrible weather was supposed to last for a few more days and that the roads were going to stay closed for a few more days. 

Update: We looked on the news last night and the rock slide was massive. It looked like a good chunk of the mountainside slid down. Crazy!