A tale of two glaciers

Alex left you after he had just jumped out of a plane. Whaaaaat!!!! Madness. Actually I had been there and done that so really he was just catching up with me but we wont dwell on that…

We headed towards the west coast stopping at Greymouth for a food shop and a wander around the visitor centre. Other than that there wasn’t much to see. The coastline was amazing. We made a few stops for some mandatory selfies and retired for the night at a small campsite. It was really a restaurant with a big patch of green space that the owners now called a campsite. We were going to have a glass of wine in the bar but it was about 3 times the price of the bottle we had in the car so it was back to the wine in thermos mugs. Those Walmart mugs are doing us so proud. The issue with the campsite and, actually, the coast in general, is the sandflies. They are horrendous. They’re smaller than mosquitoes yet seem deadlier. They manage to get to even the smallest amount of skin on show, which was always my ankles. The itchiness was out of this world and my ankles turned into a mess. So we were pretty horrified by the amount of these rank little creatures at this particular campsite. The inside of the outer tent layer was black with them. To get into our tent one of us had to hold a torch away from the tent to lure the flies away whilst the other jumped in. Then the person in the tent had to be ready to open the zip in a split second whilst person 2 jumped in. Chaos. Is this what we signed up for all those months ago when booking our flight on insect free Northcote road?! Certainly not. But I suppose it makes the blogs a bit more interesting….!

The next morning we fled the campsite at early doors and stopped to have breakfast at a picnic bench next to the sea. Not a bad little spot! We did a couple of short walks and ended up at pancake rocks where the rocks, funnily enough, look like pancakes all stacked up. It said it was a good place to spot Hector’s dolphins but alas, Hector wasn’t playing ball today and the dolphins didn’t turn up. We pressed along the coast and arrived at the town of Franz Josef, home to the Franz Josef glacier. After a quick lap around a potential campground we moved onto the next one and set up camp.

We had booked to go kayaking the next day and the weather the following morning was amazing. Clear skies which, in a place that has over 200 days of rain every year, we felt very lucky about. The lake we kayaked on was like a mill pond and the reflection of Mt Cook in the water was spectacular. In the afternoon we walked to a view point of the glacier. I visited the glacier in 2012 and back then we did a tour which included walking on the ice. The amount it had retreated in 8 years was shocking. Now the only tours are heli-walking tours. We questioned the logic of flying helicopters and adding to the carbon emissions over somewhere that is rapidly depleting. It also meant that every 10-15 minutes from before 8am until after 6pm, helicopters were flying over the town, which made it very noisy. That night we went to the thermal pools in town. Over the last 6 months we have been lucky to have tried a few thermal pools over the world. These ones were nice but it seemed the water wasn’t naturally hot so really it was just small swimming pools. It was relaxing all the same.

Our first stop the next morning was to Lake Matheson. It’s surrounded by a 5km path so we decided to run it rather than walk to get our steps and exercise in for the day. However, Kitty (our car) had other ideas. As we were driving up a hill just before Fox Glacier, the town near the lake, she suddenly lost all power. Even with pedal to the floor we crawled along. Oh dear. We called the car company and it was decided we would drive to the local garage in Fox Glacier as it was only 5 minutes from the lake. After a quick run we went to the garage. It turned out there were a few things wrong with Kitty and we were not going to be going anywhere that night. We checked into an en-suite room courtesy of the car company and waited. Kitty was going to take 2 days to fix and so the next day another car would be driven to us.

The day we didn’t have a hire car and of course it rained all day. We walked back to lake matheson again and sat in the coffee shop for ages. A gap in the rain came and we headed back to town. The gap didn’t last long and soon we were stopping to get the waterproof trousers on. A nice van driver offered us a lift so we jumped in the van and sat on some pallets he had. A little adventure. We then sat in Kitty awaiting our new hire car. After an emotional farewell and hurling bags into the new wagon trying to stop them getting wet, we waved goodbye to Kitty and set off in a Toyota, which we christened Tabitha. Tabitha wasn’t the same. We had no access to the boot from the main bit of the car which was actually really annoying. But she moved which was progress.

We headed off in the heaving rain along roads that I’m sure had great scenery but we couldn’t see a thing. We stayed the night in a little hut which was fun but had mouse traps so we were slightly more aware of where we stepped. It didn’t stop raining all night but the next day we were going to be heading to Queenstown where we hoped for sunnier weather. Alex will take you on the next leg of our trip where he had a very surprising catch up with someone…