Grand Tour South V

December 27th
I got up early in the morning and opened the car door with trepidation, expecting the worst. There was about a bucket full in the passenger side and none in the driver’s side as it had drained through the foot pedal slots. The worst news was that the passenger window had shut on the outside the rubber seal and the passenger seat was soaked, I dried it off the best I could and hoped that Dulcie wouldn’t notice. The rain had eased and the cloud was lifting, we packed the car and set off to see what we could of the glaciers. Dulcie noticed the wet seat straight away but by sitting in a raincoat it didn’t soak through too much. Franz Joseph put on a good display as the clouds briefly rolled back to show a peek of blue sky. We pressed on to Fox glacier but the cloud was rolling in again so after the briefest of looks we drove on. Shortly after the heavens opened again. Driving through the downpour with a single one speed wiper struggling against the constant stream of water, rain hammering on the canvas roof, the narrow 15 inch x 155 tyres cutting through the deepening puddles and a steady drip drip drip on my right foot made for interesting driving conditions. For once I envied the 4WDs that hammered past on the occasional straight, wipers going flat out, air conditioning on and stereo up loud but then again, what were missing out on? They would never have the primitive “man against the elements” feeling of negotiating the wild west coast in a forty year old car, negotiating the slick roads by sensing the grip on the front wheels and balancing it by gentle application of throttle. Nah, they were only observing life from their cocoon, we were living it! As the skies grew darker, and the rain heavier, our world shrank to a tunnel, observed through the arc cleared briefly by the lone wiper, the one wiper that was exactly the same age as it’s brother who had died a day earlier and was now being asked to work harder than it had ever done before. How long was it going to last? No wiper, no progress, would our bodies be found weeks later sucked dry by sandflies? It felt like we were in an old aeroplane, flying through a thunderstorm, at the total mercy of the elements. My Walter Mitty type visions were brought to a halt by a row of brake lights ahead as we rounded a blind corner, trying not to lock a wheel, I gingerly pulled up behind a long queue backed up by some incident ahead. My immediate thought was that the next car round the corner would plough into the back of me. I grabbed a raincoat and ran back up the road and started flagging down the approaching cars. Once the queue was visible from the previous straight, I splashed up to the cause of the stoppage. A tree had fallen across the road blocking the north bound lane. It was not big, the ten or so people hanging around could have shifted it but there was a cowboy in a 4WD who wanted to show off his toy by using his winch to lift it the end up and then trying to drive forward with it. All he succeeded in doing was to run over it and was making things worse. I was getting cold and wet and it looked like the mucking around was going to take a while, the southbound lane was clear so I left them to it.
The Haast bridge is 737 metres long and is one lane with priority given to the south bound traffic. There was a car ahead of me so I followed it onto the bridge. To make it easier for the northern cars, they put a couple of passing lanes capable of taking about 8 cars at a time so they can leapfrog their way over the bridge without having to wait for a full 737 clear metres. Unfortunately some twit thought he would follow the group ahead and 9 cars found themselves trying to squeeze into an 8 car overtaking bay bringing the whole bridge to a halt. By a bit of squeezing up by all the northbound cars, he managed to make enough space for our lane to get past him and avoided the humiliation of having to back up to the beginning.
Haast was our stop for the night. We booked to our motel and took 5 minutes to get out and view the sights of Haast village before the rain started again. This time I made sure that the windows were properly sealed so that in the morning the seats were dry and it was a matter of just having to bail out the foot well before we set off. The constant cold and wet had taken it’s toll on the quarter light window catch and the superglue that holds it on had given up. I picked it up off the floor and put it in the glove box without saying anything to Dulcie, she might think the car was falling apart.