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6th Jan 2011 - Heavy Rain and Strong Winds

We awoke to the sound of heavy rain and a buffeting wind. Since we were hoping to do the other glacier, Fox Glacier, todaykthis was bad news. Indeed you could hardly see more than 200m in the downpour. We had breakfast and decided to take the tent down - which was in a very exposed position and suffering from big gusts. As it was being taken down a big gust distorted the wholetent and a bit of the main pole gave way. So we had to get that fixed in town if possible - tho' we ended up mending it ourselves with a drinks can since there is no camping equipment shop of any sort in Franz Josef. The heavy rain persuaded us to have a reading, mending, washing sort of day. In town we heard of flood warnings ad it looked a bit like Murchison all over again.I read a huge amount of Tristram Shandy by Sterne, and Guy was rereading Proust and getting wearied by Odette de Crecy.The campers were all huddled in the kitchen for the best part of the day as the rain poured. No mountains were visible any more just rain. The campers are, particularly here, a mix from all over the world, though mostly Europeans. A German baby crawled over to play happily with my bike pump , some Chinese were getting a little tipsy on Tui Beer (the local favourite), and the French were watching tennis in the recreation room. The Brits were deep in classic literature. A discussion of the loss of the indonesian beef and cattle market was underway (apparently the Ozzies taught the Indonesians about farming, and so they stopped importing Oz's beef, etc)

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