27th November 2009
This morning revealed that the glorious weather we had yesterday had once again left us, and it was pretty miserable and cold. We left the holiday park we’d spent the night at and pulled over in Fox Village for a morning coffee before making the 3km journey down the road to Fox Glacier itself.
Fox Glacier is smaller than Franz Josef. From a viewpoint a few yards from the carpark you can get quite a good view of the glacier and its terminal face. Having done Franz Josef yesterday, and with the weather not being up to much we settled for taking a couple of snaps from here and heading on down the road.
At the junction with the main road, we picked up a Spanish hitchhiker called Alberte, who was making his way to Wanaka - further than we were going today, but he seemed happy with a lift as far as Lake Moeraki where we were headed.
On our way to this lake, we passed Bruce Bay, where we just had to pullover and take a closer look at the stones and driftwood people had stacked up into piles. Upon closer inspection, we saw that a lot of the stones had messages written on to them, so of course we needed to add another one to the collection!
Once we reached Lake Moeraki, we dropped Alberte off and then packed up to take an hour long return walk to Monro Beach, a home for rare Fiordland crested penguins and fur seals. In fact they’re so rare, that we didn’t see any. Never mind, it was a nice walk through rainforest and the beach at the end was worth it. Once back at the campervan it was time for a spot of lunch.
After lunch we continued south towards Haast, stopping off at Knights Point. This is a much photographed point, with sightings of seals and even whales from here, but by the time we were there the weather had really closed in, and there was no chance of seeing much wildlife, so we didn’t linger.
A brief stop off at the Haast Department of Conservation visitor centre showed that the weather forecast for tomorrow wasn’t supposed to be much better, so we decided to push on to a DoC campsite about half an hour from Haast, and give up on seeing any of the spectacular views through the Haast Pass.
We did make a brief stop at Roaring Billy Falls and take a quick ten minute walk through the rainforest. We could certainly hear the falls before we saw them, even though we were on the other side of the river, so they are aptly named. By this time it was raining properly, so we quickly moved on.
We arrived at the Pleasant Flat campsite in heavy rain, so parked up and settled in for the night to the sound of heavy rain on the roof.