today we finally got up early enough to take the tranzalpine:
The TranzAlpine includes both one way seating and tabled group seating. Both styles allow you to experience the amazing views while enjoying the company of other passengers on-board. An open air viewing carraige allows you to get even closer to the stunning scenery and provides many opportunities to photograph your favourite spots. There’s a lot to look forward to!
Our journey is 223.8 kilometres long and takes just four and a half hours. There are 16 tunnels, and 5 viaducts, the highest being the Staircase standing at 73 metres.
it’s a nice train ride, although on the way out to greymouth i don’t know if it was the gentle rocking of the train or that it was too stuffy or maybe it’s too hard getting up that early, but we ended up sleeping through a lot of that alleged beautiful scenery.
we did get to see it on the way back as we made the return trip the same day, but the down side is that while the views were beautiful, the conductor’s “colorful” narration became quickly tedious, with essentially the same facts and even jokes parroted on the way back. it was as if you were forced to sit on the disneyland jungle ride over and over, which i understand disneyland fans actually do for fun, but i’d rather be on mr. toad’s wild ride. or even the teacups.
we realized on the way back that what we had done was to spend a full day travelling, in order to get exactly nowhere: ending up in the same place where we started.
what also didn’t help was by living and scheduling our itinerary and lodging day to day, today we had to change hotels inconveniently while remaining in christchurch, so we put in all the effort of going somewhere else, but not actually doing so in any great sense.
they say that the tranzalpine is one of the top six scenic train rides in the world. i don’t know what the other five are, but i’m guessing the polar express is not one of them.
Posted at December 8, 2004 10:03 PMComments are now closed for this entry. Thank you for playing.