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Published: February 27th 2014
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On arrival in Franz Josef we were told you could no longer walk up the glacier from the bottom after previous avalanches had killed people making it unsafe. The option they provided was to do the 'Ice Explorer' where you get a helicopter up to a safer part of the glacier and explore all of the caves and cracks etc from up there. However, it was $299 for the privilege so having already overspent we didn't do it. We chilled out that afternoon and it was the girls turn to cook so they made fajitas for us all. We again had pre drinks in the rooms and us lads were pretty smashed by the time we went down to the bar. It was a fluorescent party that night so loads of people were dressed in neon and we just got our faces painted. The other lads, George, Nick, Ali and James all went in really good fancy dress and at one point I ended up with Ali's sheriff gun going round shooting everybody. It was a fun night!
I had a bit of a lie in in the morning and then me, Gary and Tim cooked some sausage and egg
sandwiches whilst Freeman showered. We took a walk around town to the iSite to look at what walks we could do. We ended up hiring out mountain bikes for just $15 and cycled 5km to the car park and then walked to the closest viewing point that they have of the glacier. Once we got to the valley we could see the glacier high above along with a river, streams and waterfalls where the melting ice flowed down from the glacier. We all took our shoes off to go and paddle in the ice cold water and within a minute your feet were numb. Then out of nowhere Tim, the freaky deaky Dutch legend, stripped down to his boxers and went fully underneath the ice cold waterfall! There was no chance any of us were gonna follow suit. We got to the viewpoint which is still around 1km from the base of the glacier but we still got some nice pictures and Gary had a really good zoom on his camera so we got some good close up shots of it too. We walked back to our bikes, rode to the hostel via the bakery, showered, got ready and ended
up drinking again. We played limbo in the bar and had a fairly chilled night after that just having a few drinks and chatting away.
Next morning we had breakfast and got on the bus to Lake Matheson. The weather was amazing so we managed to catch the perfect mirror image of Mount Cook and the sky on the lake. You couldn't tell which way was up as the water was so still, the snow capped mountains were clearly visible, it was bliss. We took the hour long walk around the lake and got some more amazing pictures that don't even look real. Me and Gary chatted away for the whole hour. Next stop was another beach location but we didn't stay for long as the sand flies were eating us alive. We headed up and over the mountains to the other side of the Southern Alps where the landscape changed from tropical to dry. Around 90% of all the rainfall is actually to the west of the Alps and they act as a barrier for this weather reaching the east side. We stopped off at Thunder Creek Falls and got a nice photo pretending to pour the whole
waterfall into our mouths. We arrived in Wanaka and the lake was beautiful but we had all agreed to finally have a night off the booze. We had a walk down to the lake with the intention of swimming but the weather had different ideas as it was cold, cloudy and windy so we just went back to the hostel, cooked dinner and had an early night ready to smash it in Queenstown for the next week.
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