Blogs from Glaciers, South Island, New Zealand, Oceania - page 3

There was rain overnight…not a good sign for what the weather was going to be like for the day. There had even been a light snowfall and the mountains are clouded in. Today we are booked at 9.15am to do a heli-hike on Franz Joseph Glacier - how exciting! This combines a brief helicopter ride to about 2/3rds up on the glacier then a hike for 2-3 hours. So this means another early morning - at least it’s a half decent 7.30! Still, we both could really go a sleep in; especially with no kitty cats to run around crazy til we fed them. It’s raining the entire 30 minute drive to FJ Village and the cloud has not budged from the mountains. Our fears are confirmed after checking with the booking desk for our tour. ... read more

Being used to early starts by now, we got up before sunrise to do a walk around the base of Franz Joseph glacier, as we were going to hike up the Fox glacier later that day. On the way we saw a lake which had the clearest reflection of Franz Joseph - see the picture. Unfortunatley, due to high demand, we were unable to do the full day hike up Fox glacier, as we had hoped. Instead we did the half day, which was amazing, just a little short. We were kitted out with crampons and set off on an hours walk to the front of the glacier. From here we had a steap fifteen minute climb beside the face, where we put on our crampons and stepped onto the ice. The colour of the ice ... read more

As we headed back up the west coast we reached the fox and st francis glaciers. We took a helicopter flight over the gaciers to get a birds eye view and actually landed on top of the mountains in the snow. hannah did a hike through the ice but me and jade were being too lazy as it was uphill so didnt do that bit. It was really cool flying over all the snow, you can see where the ice has water in it and its bright blue, it really is like off superman. ... read more

Our first stop to day is Punakaika about 40km north of Greymouth, there is a short board walk along the coast here that allows access to some pretty interesting and unusual limestone formations. The rocks have a layered affect hence their name Pancake Rocks, there are also some impressive blow holes but we missed the tide so missed the show, but it was a beautiful place and very photogenic ofcourse. It took about 2 hours to get to our cabin Whataroa where we dumped our bags and headed to an information kiosk to book ourselves on a Helicopter Hike on the top of Fox Glacier. We then headed to Franz Joseph the "town" that services the Glacier tourists before taking a walk to the ice face, we decided not to get to close as I didnt ... read more

On the way to Te Taho to catch up with a friend of Dave's. Along the way we stopped at Ross an old gold mining town. We did a walk of water race that was used to supply the gold miners with water the alluvial mining operations. They washed all the silt down the valleys and got it at the bottom, then extracted the gold. The largest gold nugget ever found in NZ was found here, and was 99oz in 1907. Mark's farm is about 2500ac and he has 500 cow dairy herd. We based ourselves here because Franz Josef and Fox Glacier where only just down the road. Dave had worked for Mark on his dairy farm on the North Island for 2 years and had come down south when they purchased this farm on ... read more