Week 23 Greymouth to Queenstown

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Much of this week was spent waiting for good enough weather to be able to heli-hike on Franz Joseph glacier. Often the town was clear but the mountain was either covered in cloud or the winds were too strong. Unfortunately you had to keep going back to the booking office every couple of hours to be available for the next trip that might catch a weather-window and go. Only thing to do was to sit in a bar or cafe and eat and drink. Shame.

We started the week with a half day bus trip between Greymouth and Franz Joseph. Our first stop was at Hokitika where we were advised to stock up at the supermarket and to get cash as FJ is very expensive and only has one ATM which often runs out of notes. Also this was the last Post Office for several hundred kilometres.

We had the opportunity to visit a pounamu (greenstone or jade) factory where they turn this stone into amazing pendants and other jewellry. This is the stone the Maori hold as the most precious and if you give a gift of greenstone to somebody its meant to bring you luck - according to all the outlets that sell the stuff. Next we stopped at an old gold mining town of Ross where some people tried their hand at panning for gold - you are guaranteed to find some tiny specks of gold in your big pan of gravel, but its net worth is far less than the dollars you have paid for the privilege of swirling a heavy tin dish in freezing cold water for ten minutes. They had some good photos showing how large the town was in the gold rush era of the 1800’s when there were over 100 hotels. Right next to the town is the crater left from a large open-cast mine that has filled with water, is over 150 feet deep and looks like a small lake.

As we started to get closer to the Southern Alps the scenery changed to dense rain forest and even more steep twisty roads. Our final stop en route was at a Bushman Centre at Pukekura where they had some animals and a lot of the famous West Coast attitude. For example there was a notice at the entrance that said (edited) “You are in a rainforest, therefore it rains. Don’t ask us what the weather is going to be like, we are working. You guys are the ones on holiday and who have time to look up the weather reports in the paper”. Another example was the fact that they only served plain coffee. They got very rude to those people who asked for a latte, mochachino or some other “ponsy Auckland” drink and referred to an espresso as a fast Japanese train and a flat-white as an Englishman run over by a truck. You could have coffee with or without milk. End of.

They had all manner of strange things for sale, items made from possum including pies and fur clothing which is actually very soft. You could pay to go and watch a 20 minute film about endangered wildlife in the region and to see a live kiwi bird, but I didn’t bother. Opposite was the Puke Pub, whose menu included a take-out lunch called “Gag n’Bag - anything dead on bread” and “Guess That Mess - straight from the highway” and “Headlight Delight - fresh from the roadside to your plate”.

Outside were a couple of stags with full antler sets that were very tame and some goats with a newborn kid that was very sweet. You could pay for bags of animal food for them but we didn’t, just picked the long grass around the car park and fed them through the fence. Well, they wouldn’t tell us about the bloody weather !

We reached Franz Joseph just after 1pm and got quickly checked into the hostels (which are all next to each other). The weather had turned nasty and it had started to rain heavily. The town only really exists to support the tourist trade for visiting the glacier and doing extreme sports, with one main street with a couple of cafes and restaurants but the outlets are mainly booking offices for the various activities on offer.

I found a nice restaurant that had lovely cosy outdoor firepit surrounded by comfy sofas, with big woollen blankets that you could wrap around you whilst having a few glasses of wine and getting an attractive red flush from the heat of the fire. Their food was good too so I stayed for dinner and got the table next to a bunch of the glacier guides who were bemoaning the fact that they “hadn’t had a good compound fracture evacuation for a while".

The next day it was pouring with rain and you couldn’t see the end of the street, never mind the mountains. Therefore the morning heli-hike that I had booked was cancelled and eventually so were the other ones all that day, so I had to rebook for the next day. The heli-hike is where you get taken by helicopter to a spot quite far up the glacier much higher than the day hikes can get to. You strap on crampons and spend around 2 hours hiking and climbing over rough ice with your guide cutting steps on the steep parts, squeezing through ice caves and seeing amazing formations of blue glacier ice, then you get collected by the helicopter. Its one of the few places on the planet that you can do this and they provide all of the equipment (including clothing and boots). It was something I had on my bucket list.

Some people still did the half or full day hike up the glacier and they came back looking cold, miserable and knackered - they said that it was really good but as they had been soaking wet and cold all day it rather ruined the experience, even though there was more blue colour in the ice due to the rain washing away the snow covering. I spent the day with a couple of other girls checking out the tiny town between showers, drinking cheap wine from the supermarket in the hostel lounge and watching daft films. We stayed dry and warm.

Yet again my heli-hike was cancelled and so was the next one. Rather than miss out on the whole glacier experience I gave up and rebooked on a Two Glacier Scenic flight over both Franz Joseph and Fox glaciers that included a snow landing high up in the mountains above the glaciers. It wasn’t as glamorous and exciting as the hike, but it was more likely to go ahead as the pilots can vary the route and destinations more easily. I was also sick of going back to the office every couple of hours for 2 days running with all my kit for the hike.

I got lucky and my scenic flight went ahead. After a short but succinct briefing about what to do and not do around the helicopter we got into a van for the 500 metre drive to the helipad. I guess its easier to herd tourists on and off buses than to round them up if they walk and its easier to keep them off the launch pads and away from the chopper blades, but we did feel daft been driven across the road.

There were 5 passengers on my flight - two middle aged couples and me - so I politely asked the bus driver if I could sit in the front of the helicopter. From past experience I knew that you get a much better view and also there is less vibration, which means less blurry photos. It worked and I got the front seat to myself on the understanding that after the ice landing I would swap with one of the other couples. As I was first onboard I chatted to the pilot Steve who was a cool dude and he offered to take some shots of me with my camera when we were “up top”. Sweet.

Within two minutes of taking off we got our first look at the glacier that runs almost to the edge of town and had its bottom section surrounded by forest. The two glaciers we saw today (Franz Joseph and Fox) are the only ones in the World that are registered as moving forwards. There was still cloud in the valley so the photos are not very clear until we broke through into the blue sky about half way up. The scale of the glacier is jaw-dropping and really doesn’t come across in pictures. Each crevasse is hundreds of metres long and deep and each ripple or block of ice would hold thousands of people. There was nothing to include in the shots to give a sense of scale but I have shown one hazy shot that was taken on full zoom, showing a blurry speck that is actually a large group of hikers on the ice.

We spent 10 minutes flying around the mountains with Steve pointing out a distant view of Mount Cook, several waterfalls and the top of Fox glacier in the distance. As we approached the landing zone it suddenly strikes you just how massive the top ice field is when you see a minute speck over on the far side gradually turn into a fellow helicopter that had already landed.

We got out and had 15 minutes on the snow and ice to take photos and to play but the ground was a bit too frozen to make snowballs. It was fun sliding down the sides of the small ice ridges though and as the wind had dropped and the sun was blazing it was not at all cold, which may have had something to do with the four layers of clothing I had on. The views were amazing - the colour of the sky was cobalt blue and you could see clouds below you in the valley - and the air felt clean and fresh. There was a dirty coloured shadow over some of the ice which was the result of a large sandstorm in the centre of the Australian outback that had been blown up here a couple of months ago and the sand had settled on the ice.

We took off to return on a longer loop over Fox glacier but I couldn’t get any decent shots, partly due to the cloud and partly due to the strong reflections on the windows on my side of the chopper. In an ideal world I would have liked to have landed on Fox and to have got a shot with a bag of Fox’s Glacier Mints in my hand. However we did have a good ride back down over the forests and over several valleys with deep gorges and rivers, where some of the guys from my hostel were kayaking. It was a great trip and I didn’t feel so bad about missing out on the helihike, which remains on my “must do sometime” list. The Scenic trip was warmer, less tiring, a hundred dollars cheaper and I would probably have been the long-awaited compound fracture evacuee.

Frustratingly when we left for our next long bus trip between Franz Joseph and Wanaka the sun was shining without a cloud in the sky. This whole area of the West Coast around the rain forests gets up to 7 metres, yes folks that’s over 21 FEET of rain per annum. Apparently in 1982 there was a massive storm in FJ when a torrential 1.83 metres of rain fell over 72 hours, causing terrible damage to the area including wiping out the bridge and airstrip - in fact even more rain fell but the gauge overflowed so it wasn’t recorded.

We passed through the smaller town of Fox where we glimpsed the bottom of the Fox glacier on our way to the access point for Lake Matheson and a nice hike. There is a good cafe and gift shop at the car park with well signposted routes you can walk to the lake, but as we only had an hours stop we were forced to go only as far as the first mountain viewpoint, which took about 20 minutes of rapid walking each way. The path was well laid out and passed through woodland plus you get to walk over a cool wooden bridge that sways and swings when more than one person is crossing, which was fun.

Lake Matheson is also referred to as Mirror Lake and its still dark waters make for fabulous photographs of the forest and mountains in an almost perfect reflection. A perfect shot is where you are able to turn the picture upside down and see the same image and not know which is the sky and which is the reflection of the sky. We got there quite early in the morning and the mist was still hovering over the water and the light was constantly changing. This actually made for some interesting shots and by the time we had to leave I had almost captured the full mirror image. You could see great views of Mount Tasman and Mount Cook and from where we were Mt Tasman looked to be slightly taller, but that is only as it was nearer and in fact Mt Cook is the higher.

Up around the FJ and Fox area you saw attractive cloudy pale blue water in the streams and rivers, due to the glacial “flour” dissolved in the water. The glacial flour consists of minute particles of minerals that have been ground to powder by the weight of moving ice and get washed down onto the water systems turning the water to a lovely milky look.

We continued driving along increasingly steep and winding roads as we passed through the Southern Alps. Between the mountains were deep gorges with rivers running over huge boulders and many waterfalls. The water here was as clear as gin and from the steep high roads we could look down into quite deep water and see every rock and pebble trough the clear water. You could see how much wider these stream and rivers would be in the spring after the snow melt and we crossed some of them via narrow single-width road bridges.

We had a brief stop in Makarora and I am sure that when our bus rolled into town we quadrupled the population - there was not much there. From here on the forest disappeared to be replaced with open farming land and very steep hills as the land was cleared when the sheep farming industry really took off.

When we hit the coast where two seas meet we had a kodak-moment stop at Bruce Bay where we had 5 minutes to take shots of the man-made towers of pebbles that run along the whole beach. The oval shaped pebbles are all over the beach and some people busied themselves in trying to build their own mini monument while others rushed down to the sea - and then rushed back again screaming as it was freezing. There is nothing else between this point and Antarctica in one direction and the bottom of Chile in the other, so no wonder the water feels like ice.

We turned back inland and the countryside started to look more and more like the Highlands of Scotland and this image was reinforced when we got our first glimpse of Lake Hawea that looked just like a loch. The sun was still shining with a blue sky, so the water of the Lake reflected the blue and was stunning. This area has two large lakes that were formed from a glacier that melted and we crossed between them on a thin strip of land called the Neck and reached Lake Wanaka, the town where I was jumping off the bus to spend two nights.

As I was thoroughly sick of sharing a toilet and shower with 50 other people (of both sexes) I splashed out and booked a double en suite YHA hostel room with a lake-view and a TV - OK it only had 2 channels but I had control of the zapper and it wasn’t constantly playing the Simpsons or a Jackass movie. It cost a lot but was really worthwhile, with a wonderful vista and and the joy of not having to queue for a pee.

The town was compact and had plenty of places to eat. There was an unusual strip of large terracotta tiles laid out along the lakeside pavement as a kind of history walk, each inscribed with interesting facts about a particular year, that included world events and also something that had happened locally. Each tile was sponsored by a local person and often the history was about their ancestors. They covered the period from the 1860’s to 2000 and it was a lovely way to pass time, wandering along in the sunshine reading them and discussing some of the more unusual ones with fellow readers.

Although it was bright, hot and sunny there was a gusty wind that blew straight down the lake off the surrounding mountains. In the distance these mountains are high and were speckled with snow so you could imagine how biting that wind would be in the winter. Wanaka has more than its fair share of bald men and I am convinced that its due to the wind, as they couldn’t possibly keep a toupee on and a comb-over would be a persistent flapping nuisance.

The second day was not as hot or bright and the wind persisted. I still managed to find plenty to do including an evening visit to one of the best cinemas ever, the Cinema Paradiso, which should be a model for picture houses everywhere. I had heard about it so had pre-booked, which you need to do as its not very large and watched the Lovely Bones film. They don’t have traditional tiered seating, but the room is informally laid out with various different kinds of seating including a choice of sofas and even a morris minor car. I sat in a comfy lazyboy recliner. You could preorder a full meal to enjoy during the proper old-fashioned long interval, but I chose to go to their cafe and bought hot fresh biscuits straight from the oven and an icecream. They had traditional popcorn and you could take your beer or wine in with you. Excellent.


As I had jumped off the bus at a mid-point stop, the pick up for the trip through to Queenstown the next day was not until 2.30pm - supposedly. The bus arrived over an hour late and, on one of the hottest days of the year in the high 30’s, we were again put on a creaky old Overflow vehicle with no airconditioning. We melted.

Thankfully there were only two fairly short sectors and after climbing up a winding mountain pass that overlooked a wonderful gorge, we got off after 45 minutes at the A..J. Hackett bungy site. This is where it all started and the jump was the first one in operation. Its still as crazy as that first time somebody was daft enough to throw themselves of a very high bridge with nothing more than a big elastic band around their ankles. Nowadays almost everyone wants to do this and they charge you serious money for the pleasure. I was not tempted at all.

It was entertaining to stand on the viewing point watching the different reactions of the people on the ledge, just before they jumped. Some just went for it and some froze and had to be talked into it by the guys who rig you up. I noticed that some got a gentle helping hand when they were teetering on the edge of bottling it. It was a very long drop and I hope you can get an idea by comparing the scale of the dead tree branches in the wide shot to the size of them compared to the girl in the pink top when she is close to the water. The water was a lovely shade of blue/green and the setting was great. The jumpers probably didn’t notice much about the view, other than the water seeming to be miles away. A couple of brave guys opted for the longer elastic thing and got dunked in the water. Mad fools.

Back on the oven bus it was thankfully only 25 minutes further to Queenstown. My first impressions as we drove in were that it looks to be a great place. Its set on a lake with hills and mountains around the edge and has a busy and well set up town centre. My first couple of nights are in the centre of town and then I move out to a lakefront hostel. I will tell you more in my next blog.

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