Fox Glacier

Before we got engaged there was a visit to a glacier which if you're sitting comfortably, I will recount to you now. After our little stroll through the Abel Tasman park we headed south following the West coast from Westport, through Greymouth and finally down to Glacier country. Some of the coastal drive was extremely beautiful, putting Australia's 'Great Ocean Drive' to shame. Along the way we stopped at a little place called Punakaiki to look at the local geological attraction (we were thinking of you Gino) Pancake Rocks. Basically some cliffs that have a multitude of layers looking a bit like pancakes, Sam thought they were great, I thought they were a touch dull and as I'm writing this particular blog, have relegated them to a mere mention.
The weather has continued to be generally sunny which meant when we arrived to see the glacier's we could actually see them and the mountains that surround them. Hoorah! These mountainous landscapes are the thing I came to see and they don't disappoint. Never having really seen snow capped 'proper' mountains either, the sight of them was particularly impressive. If you look really closely you can just see Frodo and crew walking across the snowy peaks.
In this part of New Zealand you get not one, but two ginormous glaciers to have a look at, Franz-Joseph Glacier and Fox Glacier. For no particular reason we decided to do our walk on Fox Glacier, although F-J looked very nice and so booked on to do the Nimble Fox All-Day Glacier Trek (as recommended by Bison) with Fox Guides. Being these days the nimble fox's we are it was the obvious choice. We arrived at the glacier after a short drive and got started on the walk up a steepish track that took us up and alongside the glacier. We were in a group of about 12 people (mainly dull, some groups are) with our guide, Jeremy. An hours walk took us to the edge of the glacier where we strapped on crampons to the huge boots we'd been given and immediately felt like proper mountaineering types. There was a staircase cut into the side of the glacier which they have to re-cut every day, otherwise within 2-3 days the whole thing melts. We climbed up the stairs and followed our guide around up on top of the glacier. It's a really interesting experience walking around on the ice, the views are superb and you feel like you could be in the middle of the Antarctic somewhere, in fact the previous night we'd watched 'March of the Penguins' and kept expecting them to pop up. Jeremy the guide led the way, cutting stairs into the ice as he went with his pick axe and he cut a lot of stairs that day, his arm muscles were huge, a bit like mine Alex :)
I'd love to tell you all the fascinating details about how glaciers work and move, but I can't be bothered, so you'll have to read about it here if you're interested. Sufficed to say that they move forward and backward up and down the valley over time and Fox has been moving forward since 1985. As you drive towards the glacier you see a sign which indicates where the glacier had been in 1750, a few K forward of its current position. After some time walking about on the glacier, discovering crevaces and the like we were shown an ice cave that had recently been found, in another few days it would vanish in on itself again with the ever moving flow of ice. We all stomped up and took our turns getting our photos done within the cave. I had had ideas of proposing within an ice cave, but was thwarted by the throng of people, the size of the cave and Sam chuntering on about how she was getting dripped on in the cave :)
The cave was pretty cool inspite of its small size and rainy state, the variety of blues in the ice was amazing. The colours generally and the sheer size of the glacier were spectacular. At the top of the glacier in the mountains is a bowl of snow 36k in diameter that continually feeds the glacier keeping it going as it melts and spews out water at the other end. You can go on helicopter flights to see the top of the glacier as well as Mount Cook and Mount Tasman which would be amazing, but a tad expensive for our budgets.
We took a picnic lunch with us which we ate sitting on some rocks in the middle of the glacier and made everyone jealous as we drank hot soup from our thermos. After more tramping about on the ice, we headed down and then off the glacier and back down to the small village where we were staying. We decided to treat ourselves to a night at the pub and a nice juicy steak, mmmmm. We'd been eyeing other peoples steaks up whilst enjoying a pint after the walk and worked ourselves into a steaky lather, shouting 'Steak, Steak, Steak'. However, when you want a steak desperately it often turns out to be poor and ours didn't disappoint, first turning up without the prawns we'd ordered, then coming back cold and then coming back cold again after we'd requested it being heated up. Gutted. Still we had a lovely steak the next night to celebrate our engagement.
Having seen Mount Cook in the background for a couple of days we decided to pay it a closer visit on our way down to Queenstown. A 400k round trip in fact took us to Mount Cook National Park. The journey was really nice with thousands of wild flowers along the road side and mountains popping up all over the place. As soon as we arrived at the park thought, it started raining, wouldn't you know it. We camped out in our van for the night, it got so cold, we ended up sleeping fully clothed the whole night. When morning came though, the sun was peaking out and we set off on a short 3 hour return walk to see Mount Cook. The walk took us through a valley with snow capped mountains on all sides, across 2 swing bridges and towards the Hooker Lake. On rounding the corner to get our close up view of the mountain we discovered that the clouds were still there and could only see the bottom half. We had to settle for that, but it was ok as we'd seen it from the other side. When we got back to our van we found a couple of ducks and their very cute baby ducks and spent some time feeding them out of our hands, I'm growing increasingly fond of ducks, I'm not sure what this means.

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