Posted by John
We came to New Zealand to sit out the cyclone season, do some work on the boat and see some of the country. But boat work is never done. Each project just leads to more. And apparently, New Zealand is not entirely immune to cyclones, either.
The first cyclone to affect us, Fehi, dropped a ton of rain and delayed getting our bottom painting finished. Flooding and slides (they call them slips, here) closed a few roads. But it was cyclone Gita that had the bigger impact. It hit Samoa, then, sadly, according to the UK Daily Mail, pretty much destroyed one of our favorite places—Big Mama’s, on Pangaimotu island in Tonga, not to mention the heavy damage to the Nuku’alofa waterfront. It’s hard to think about that, having just passed through there, enjoying it so much.
The crazy thing about Gita was the “S” turns it took across the ocean, going first one way, and then back another, until it was aiming right at the middle of New Zealand. No longer a tropical cyclone, but still a cyclone all the same, the weather forecasts were getting more serious. Spurred on by already scheduled appointments in March, including the marina shuffling us from one slip to another, we decided that if we were going to do our road trip at all, we should get as far south as we could, as quickly as we could. Loading up our tiny car was like figuring out a Chinese puzzle. Then we left for Wellington, with an overnight campout along the way, and took the ferry across Cook Strait in the dark.
We made it as far as Christchurch before the storm hit. Instead of being south of the storm, luck would have it we were right in it’s path. The government declared a state of emergency in Christchurch just prior to our arrival, and we heard warnings that “Trampers, campers and boaties” should evacuate Marlborough Sound, on Cook Strait.
Christchurch is on the east coast, and Gita was approaching from the west, so no one was too worried about high wind where we were, but there was a substantial amount of rain for two days which caused some flooding. We spent those two nights in a motel, with one day shopping in Christchurch, and the other day getting our brakes fixed. However, Christchurch, and the highway we took to get there, were heavily damaged in a 2014 earthquake. The highway along the coast is still being rebuilt. We had gone through many construction zones to get to Christchurch, and now we were learning that the road was closed again, with new slips. We were happy to have gotten through before the closures. If all that wasn’t crazy enough, hitting New Zealand briefly broke up Gita into TWO storms. But, that was, finally, the end of Gita.
The sun came out, we put on our sunnies, and continued south. If nothing else, New Zealand is certainly scenic.
