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Published: November 27th 2008
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Mt. Cook, Mt. Tasman Reflection
Our reward for the hike around Lake Matheson...excellent! West Coast
November 27, 2008
We had a late start out of Wanaka. It was just so pretty and quiet in our caravan park that we took our sweet time getting showers, having breakfast, washing dishes, and putting the jigsaw puzzle van back to its daytime configuration. We’re a team now, and we might win the “changing the van from nighttime sleeping to daytime use” Olympics.
We also decided to take a drive to an overlook of Lake Wananka and I requested that we make a stop at Puzzling World. If you are in Wananka, you don’t need to stop there unless you are into mazes and optical illusions in a big way. We just did the free stuff, and were then on our way to finally getting off the southern section of the map.
We crossed Haast Pass through the mountains to the West Coast. We didn’t do Haast Pass half-assed either. We stopped at every beautiful overlook and took every short walk to every little pool. When we finally got to the town of Haast, it seemed strange to see the ocean and be in rainforest again so soon. We stopped at a couple of beaches. At
one, the sandflies were so nasty that I jumped back into the van in about two minutes.
Today was the day to see the glaciers. We were a bit disappointed when we got to Fox Glacier because the road was closed. There had been so much rain there in the past week that the road was washed out. We could have walked four kilometers to see it, but we’ve seen a lot of glaciers and of the two we were to see today, Fox was the lesser. What we were interested in was the hike near Fox Glacier around Lake Matheson where there were great views of Mt. Cook (we’re seeing it from the other side now) and Mt. Tasman and the views are reflected in the lake. We wanted to take this hike in the early evening when the sun was on the mountains so we first drove on up the road 12 miles and walked the short distance to see Franz Josef Glacier. What makes Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers interesting is that they come right down to the rainforest very near the ocean.
At Franz Josef, we ran into our NY friends for the fourth time.
Lake Wanaka
This is a very big lake. Fun to see them, we wished each other Happy Thanksgiving.
Back at Lake Matheson, the hike was easy and we were very lucky to be able to view Mt. Cook and Mt. Tasman with zero clouds. Doesn’t always happen that way for us. We are in a caravan park near the lake with a view of the Southern Alps and we can see just the tip of Mr. Cook. Dinner in the camper tonight…we got back too late from the hike. Everything in the village of Fox Glacier was closed.
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Sandy
non-member comment
lol
roflm you know what off.