Wellington to Franz Josef

---

Festive greetings to all. I know I am a little late, but better late than never. I hope everyone enjoyed the festive period, as cold as it was back in the UK. It must have been nice in a way to have a white Christmas and equally as nice not to have an X-factor number one at Christmas. It definitely felt strange spending Christmas on the other side of the world on the beach.

Before I start the next blog, can I apologise for being very slack with the updates. It has been a while since I updated the blogs, hopefully with the next few blogs that I publish over the next few days I should catch up. I will start with Wellington and work my way down to Christchurch. From Christchurch I flew to Sydney and worked my way down to Melbourne.

After three days in Wellington I planned to move on, but the only problem was that the Kiwi bus was full for the next five days. I was forced to make other arrangements so I could get from the North Island to the South Island. I managed to find a flight from Wellington to Nelson for just over $100 NZD so this meant I didn’t have to take the 3.5 hour ferry and 2 hour bus journey from Picton to Nelson, so it didn’t work out too bad. I met up with Tom (who I met in the Bay of Islands) and was introduced to 3 guys who he had been travelling with, Rob, Sam and Oliver (Olly).

We all wanted to visit Abel Tasman National Park, but the tours offered by the Kiwi Ex were too short and expensive for the duration of time spent in the park, so we arranged our own trip. After doing a little bit of research, we decided to do a 4 day, 3 night trip, kayaking our way up the coast. Each night we would camp and then the following day kayak further up the coast. The night before we were supposed to leave we decided on what we needed and come ten o'clock we had a plan of action for the following day. It worked out cheaper for us to hire a car between the five of us for the four days, than getting the public bus from Nelson to the park. I picked up the car the following day and after a trip to the supermarket and to the bottle shop we were on our way to Marahau.

When we reached Marahau, we realised after speaking to the woman from the kayak company that we hadn’t taken much into consideration in terms of planning for our trip. If we wanted to take the kayaks away overnight then we needed to complete a safety briefing, and we could only drop the kayaks off in certain places along the coast. We changed our plans slightly to accommodate this but by the time we got to Marahau it was late in the day, so we checked into a hostel called Old MacDonald’s. As this would be the last time for about three days until we would eat good food, we treated ourselves to a homemade casserole and a few beers. No hostel called Old MacDonald could have that name without having some form of farm animals and two in particular took a liking to us. In the morning, what was left of our casserole was fed to the farms duck, which pestered us all the night before sniffing around for food. In the morning he had gone through the bin outside our room in the quest for food. The farms pit-bull dog came to introduce himself to us, and he took a liking to a piece of wood which had nails in. Trying to be as pro-mutt as possible we tried to get this piece of wood away from the dog, which was easier said than done. On more than one occasion we had the piece of wood in our hands, but unfortunately the hound was still hanging from the piece of the wood at the time. We managed to get the piece of wood off the dog, but 5 minutes later the dog managed to find another piece of wood, again with a nail in it, so we left him to it.
After the short drive to the kayaking company in the morning, and a two hour safety briefing it was time for us to leave Marahau in the Kayaks and head up the coast to our first stop, Anchorage Bay. As there were five of us, we had two, two-man kayaks and one single kayak. One of us in our party admitted to being a member of the canoe club whilst at university, and then swiftly added that he was only a member because of the social side of canoeing (getting drunk apparently), whatever Rob.

The weather on the first day was amazing. The sun was out, and it was perfect weather to be on the water. Within thirty seconds of setting off, Olly and I managed to get beached on some sand. It was going to be a long and hard four days. We set off and visited Adele Island which was on the way to Anchorage Bay. Adele Island had clear blue water and as it was low tide, had a long thin beach which stretched out into the ocean.

Anchorage Bay was only a short distance away from Adele Island. After we unpacked our kayaks and stored them away, we set out to build our tents for the night and cooked our first meal of our trip, pasta. Anchorage Bay was a fairly big campsite and along with us, there were a huge group of school kids also camping there. After dinner, we chopped some wood and started a fire and started drinking some of the alcohol we had brought with us. I called it a night early doors, but the rest of the guys had a few drinks. Rob, in particular had a few drinks (red wine and vodka), and managed to offend some of the school kids teachers that were camped nearby. The following morning he woke to the school kids shouting his name from outside his tent, and then they let down the pegs on the tent, although it wasn’t his tent which they let the pegs out, it was Olly’s and Sam’s tent.

The destination for the second night was Barks Bay, which was about an hour or so away from Anchorage Bay. The weather had completely changed from the blazing sunshine the day before and we now had pouring rain to contend with. It rained all morning, so we waited until it had stopped, then packed up all our equipment back into the canoes and set off for Barks Bay. All the tent sites at Barks Bay were booked up so we had to stay just around the corner at Medland’s Bay, which was awful. We managed to pitch our tents in between some trees, and then chucked a ball around the beach for a while. The weather was very overcast and was nothing like the weather the previous day.

The weather was getting worst and by the third day when we had to kayak from Barks Bay back to Marahau we were all wondering why we had chose to take part in this trip. We didn’t pack enough food, the weather was raining all the time, the campsite at Medland Bay was awful and all our clothes etc were wet. We decided that we would get up early, pack up the kayaks as quick as possible and then kayak back to Marahau as quick as we could. We got up for 7am and had the kayaks packed and were ready for leave by 8am. It was raining hard on the way back and the sea was rough, much rougher than what we had experienced over the last few days, but we all had one thing on our mind and that was to get back to Marahau were there was a hot shower and food. It took us just over 2 hours to get back to Marahau, much quicker than we had expected. After a hot shower we were in the car on the way back to Nelson to enjoy the prospect of being able to sleep in a bed that night instead of a wet, cold sleeping bag.
One of the two day stops for the Kiwi bus is Franz Josef. The day we arrived the five of us, plus Natalie and Josh signed up to do the Ice climbing for the following day. In Franz Josef you have the ability to go and walk on the glacier, which is the option most people do. There is also the ability to get a helicopter ride to the top of the glacier and then walk back down (for the moneyed traveller), or there is the ice climbing. This has to be one the hardest things that I have done whilst travelling. The night before however we ended up in the hostel bar for a couple (not wanting to have too many before our climb the following day). Some of the guys got talked into a bar game where you could win a white water rafting trip in Queenstown and a bar crawl in Queenstown. The bar game went something like this. There were two people. One person was on the others back (piggyback). The person who was receiving the piggy back had to feed the other a pint of lager which had to be drunk as quick as possible. When this has been drunk, the person doing the piggybacking (who had an oar in between their legs) had run in between some chairs and back. Once this had been completed, the person on their back had to jump off and down a Jagermeister. Sounds simple enough. Well, two of the guys ended up together, Rob and Sam and Tom, ended up with a random girl on his back. I was lucky and had been paired up with Lucia, who is probably the most competitive girl I have ever met. Straight from the offset, she said ‘we have to win’. So, to cut a long story short, in a time of 21 secs, we won. Tom and his partner came second with 22 seconds (gutted). So, collecting our prize, I expected that we would have the choice of either the white water rafting, or the bar crawl, but it didn’t quite work like that. There was one rafting trip for one person, and there was one bar crawl ticket for one person, so we had to decide who was going to have what. My argument of doing 95% of the work didn’t quiet wash. I did mention that Lucia was competitive, so she ended up with the white water rafting trip, and I got the free bar crawl voucher for Queenstown (which I never used), so all in all I got a great deal out of the arrangement.

The following day was a 7am rise and shine. The ice climb would consist of a small trek and then about 2-3 hours of climbing. I was dressed in the full gear, including crampons and ice axe, boldly going where thousands have been before me. The ice climbs consisted of faces from between 10 -20 metres high, which doesn’t seems like a lot, but after my third climb, I thought my arms were going to fall off. There is a technique to climbing. You are using both your arms (with an ice axe in each hand) and your legs to climb (the spikes on the crampons). Your whole body gets a work out, and about half way up on my final climb I felt like I had nothing left in me to get me to the top. After a rest and the thought of the abuse I would get if I didn’t make it to the top I eventually got there, but aching arms and tiredness aside, this is one of the most enjoyable things I have done since my travels started. I think skydiving only just beats ice climbing.

---