25th November 2009
I think one of the hightlights of the campervan trip so far has to be when we both got up at 3am to go and use the facilities. Since we were in such a remote spot, with very little ambiant light, the stars studded the sky like diamonds, beautiful. I was so enthralled by it that I just stood there for 10 minutes looking up, just a perfect night sky, and I even saw a satellite passing through.
Somewhere between 3am and this morning though the weather changed and became cloudy because it was another grey day when we got up this morning. Today we were exploring glacier country, starting with the Franz Joseph Glacier.
There are two glaciers in the Tai Poutini National Park on the west coast of the south island. This is the only place at this latitude where glaciers come so close to the ocean and their development is largely due to the west coast’s high rainfall. This area has on average 230 inches of rainfall per year (compare that to London where the average is 23 inches a year). This falls as snow on the top of the glacier which fuses into clear ice then surges down the valleys.
As with everything in New Zealand, you can pay varying amounts of money to take guided hikes on the ice ranging from a simple half day hike, to ice climbing and helicopter rides. We weren’t sure that we wanted to do any of this, so opted for the free, independent walks as a way of guaging whether we wanted to go on the ice or not (the only way to get on the ice is to take a tour).
We started with the quick walk to the lookout over the glacier which was quite spectacular, not only for the sheer size of it, but also the small patches of blue ice which we could see higher up. It’s just a shame it was so overcast. We then took the longer walk across the riverbed, between the sheer cliffs running with waterfalls to the terminal face. Watching the guided tours go up the glacier gave us a real indication of it’s massive size.
As we walked back from the glacier face with helicopters buzzing overhead, where they were dropping off people on the ice we decided that instead of taking a guided tour, which seemed to focus on the bottom of the glacier we would do the 5 and a half hour return walk to Jackson’s point which gives views over the actual glacier. However, the cloud was already very low at this stage, so we decided to make the half hour drive onto Fox Glacier, do some walking around there and return early tomorrow morning, hopefully before the cloud began to gather.
Good plan, but the weather had other ideas, as we crossed the mountain to Fox, the rain started and got gradually heavier. In the end, we parked up in a campervan site in Fox, did our washing to get rid of the smell of smoke from our clothes. A visit to a local cafe and a quick check of our email and we were in for the night.