Ali goes west

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Well it's been a busy day, but most of my time has been taken up on either the train or the bus. Not that I'd have you think that either of these was a chore. 
My early start from Christchurch took me to a packed railway station, the two deisel trains that were to pull me and the multitudes of other passanger over the southern alps and through arthurs pass were already throbbing by the time I arrived and the two luggage compartments filled me with dread as I saw my bag wedged into an available hole pushed by 2 able kiwis. 
The journey starts out over the cantabury plains, which are to be honest quite flat and after the first twenty minutes quite boring, and I'll be honest I feel asleep, well it was an early start and some girl in the dorm had kept me talking, well acknowledgeingly listening, to her life history till late. 
But when I woke up the landscape took my breath away. The flat endless plains had been replaced by sheer scree slopes and deep river valleys with torrents flowing at the bottom, all that, what I'm now coming to think of as, new Zealand blue a soft powdery colour thick with slit and all the more enticing for it. The train took nearly 5 hours and the views changed from dramatic to rolling in the blink of an eye. The small hamlets that have built up along the railway give a perspective of a bleak existance, a window into a pionnering past, but the communities all have a train station, shop and pub so it can't be as bad as my pessimistic brain imagines. 
After arriving in greymouth I didn't get much time to explore before getting straight on the bus for fox, and a quick glance around didn't make me feel to disappointed, but a food stop in hokitika had me wishing for more time to explore, this small town immediatly struck me as the epitomy of frontier towns anywhere, formed around the gold rush here it looks just like those American movies with one main street and, I wouldn't have been surprised to see tumbleweed rolling along. The town itself was right on the coast, the tasmin sea and it's wide long expanse of flotsum strewn beach just begged for more investigation, but it was not to be, 40 minutes later and I was back on the bus and winding my way up into the mountains. 
By this time the bus was full of not only passangers for the two glaciers but stuff being delivered to the small villages along the way, this included newspapers, 5 boxes of wedding flowers each individually managed by a passanger, 4 mysterious brown paper packages and a dustbin. Personnally I was a little let down by the lack of a chicken but I was dead impressed by this simple yet effective and very well organised delivery system that continued all the way down the coast. 
Tomorrow I challange the glacier, and to be honest I can't wait, I still can't decide whether to do a half or whole day but either way I'm going to see, climb, experience the sheer magnitude of nature and I can't wait.    

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