Day 49: Kaikoura to Picton

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Today is the halfway point of my trip. This is Day 49, and I have 49 days to go.

The Dusky Lodge reception clerk had agreed to give me a ride to the train station as long as I was willing to leave early in the morning. The train's departure time of 9:54 corresponded too well with peak check-out time.

I was willing -- the $10 saved will help make up for the $15 I rashly spent on the shuttle in Queenstown.
So at 7:30, I checked out and asked for my ride.

About 7:50, she took me to the station, and I got there at 8. The train was a bit late, and didn't come till after 10.

I sat in the Whale Watch cafe and surfed the Net. I tried ordering some ginger ale -- the first ginger ale, as opponed to ginger beer, that I'd seen here -- but it tasted terrible. I only finished half of it. I wish I'd paid a dollar more and gotten some hot chocolate.

When it was nearly time for the train, a kind Whale Watch employee took my luggage out to the tracks for me and settled me on a bench. When the train actually came, another kind employee took charge of my baggage and checked it into the luggage compartment for me.

By great good fortune, this time I was assigned to seat D, which, as I'd found out on my previous journey, was the only seat (backwards, on the right-hand side of the train) that my shoulder could tolerate. Seats A and B at my table, facing me, belonged to a Swiss couple. I tried to chat with them, but while courteous they were clearly not interested in the effort of making casual conversation in English.

For my part, I did not feel up to trying to think of something I could say in German (and, indeed, as with Japanese, when it came to it I could only think of isolated vocabulary words, most of which could not easily be worked into a conversation), so we ended up looking at the scenery and not conversing much.

This time there was, at least, the promised ocean view, and we even saw a group of seals, adults this time, on a rock. Then there was a salt distillery; the conductor said that it provided almost all the salt used in New Zealand. After that, we verred away from the coast and into wine country. The conductor showed us a building with stainless steel vats around it, which he said were full of wine.

I was met at the train station by Mal, the owner of the Buccaneer Lodge. I was initially confused by the absernce of a sign saying Buccaneer Lodge; an e-mail several months ago had told me that she would be carrying one -- but it turned out that she was the *new* owner of Buccaneer Lodge, having bought the place back in November.

She took me shopping, which was very kind of her as the hostel was several miles from Picton, on Waikawa Bay. The supermarket was a new chain to me, Fresh Choice. It seemed a little more expensive than New World, though that might just have been local pricing.

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