Climb every mountain

I'm feeling blessed.
Despite waking up before 5am and just being plain anxious about missing the train or leaving something behind, it has been a glorious day.

I scored the passenger seat beside the driver that shuttled us to the train station.
As he went around picking others up, I realised I missed some beautiful shots just because I did not walk to view from another angle. Oh well, lesson learned.

The train ride was beautiful.

I actually fell asleep between taking pictures both left and right of the railroads.
Which some would think is a waste but I had to.
Had a really late night roommate come in and got on under me.
I don't think she ended up sleeping at all as I could hear her tossing about when I wake up.

Back to my ride.
I loved putting myself to the test by just wearing tshirt and jeans into the open carriage where it was windy and the rain came in.
Looking down at the vastness of their river is like nothing I have ever seen before.
And looking up at those snow covered peaks was stunning.
I'm so thankful that we could be on the train all the way to Greymouth.
Usually in autumn and winter and there's alot of rain, a certain area that the train uses will require the passengers to board a bus and meet the train again somewhere after.

There was this one time we stopped to wait for a freight train to pass us.
It was informational to know from the train driver that the freight trains are the reasons why they can have this passenger train now, as in rails are maintained because of the freight trains.

At the end of that leg, it was onto a bus from Greymouth to Franz Josef.
I realized in this part of the land here they have a lot of one way bridges.
And people just take turn driving through them.
But other than that it was pretty much like driving to Echuca.
Small towns here and there that the bus driver delivered newspaper and parcels to.

I'm so glad he stopped at Hokitika!
At first I wasn't glad because it was around 2pm which was past lunch hour and pretty pointless to me (the cranky lack of sleep side was thinking).
But then I got down and got a postcard which meant finding the post office. Again.
Close to the post office was this walkway that lead to the beach.
And what waves they have there!
Waves that could pull people in and drown them or smash them into pieces. A good way to die, actually. It wasn't pretty and calm but dangerously beautiful!
I wished I had more time there.

After that excitement, I slept somemore on the bus as it rained heavier in the later part of the day.
When I reached my hostel turns out one of the other passenger since Christchurch is in my room and from Sabah.
I feel blessed sleeping with a Malaysian in the room each new place I go to so far.
I'm still frankly shy and tongue tied with the others from everywhere which I keep finding are so amazing as they have travelled from further away.
And the other thing that I'm glad about is that I'm on the lower bunk bed today.