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Published: October 26th 2008
The honeymoon luck was with us once again! The next morning the sun was shining brightly and we could indeed see the bottom of the glacier from our campsite. From there it looked a lot like one of the other snowy topped mountains, but as we flew over it in our helicopter we could see what an enormous block of ice it was, cascading (well, in an almost stationary way) down the mountains. We were lucky enough to get straight onto the heli-hike in the morning and extra lucky as when we were coming down and the cloud was rolling back in, they decided to cancel their afternoon heli-hike. Phew, we are two lucky honeymooners 😊
Anyway, the helicopter ride was about 10 minutes and took us up the glacier and over the top part where the blue ice and the caves are really spectacular. The way it works is that with a half day hike you get so far up (but not much further than the muddy bottom parts of the glacier), for a whole day hike you would get a bit further, but the benefit of the heli-hike is that it took us really close to the top
of the glacier where the ice is moving faster - not fast enough to notice but about 5m per day apparently. There were loads more blue ice caves up there, and it was absolutely breathtaking - we simply couldn't take it all in for the first hour. You will have to see the pictures as my description will never do it justice. We got kitted out in cramp-ons and with ice axes and off we went - very, very slowly picking our way over the ice. Our guide started by building us little steps in the ice to walk on, and as we got more comfortable with our cramp-ons we took our own big steps over the ice formations, through caves and round the rather fallic ice structures. Definitely one of the best things we have done so far! But then I think we keep saying that...
We were very overdressed as we had wrapped up in thousands of layers and as it turned out the sun was shining brightly at the top and it wasn't cold at all! Still, we treated ourselves to a nice hot lunch of huge NZ mussels when we got down and then spent
the rest of the day chilling out. We had extremely nice neighbours at the campsite, a group of oldies (or so they thought - I thought they were at least as young as us in attitude) from Oz who we spent some time with that evening, swapping tales of travel and life history. They gave us two wine glasses bless them which has made all the difference - as we have been drinking nice Malborough Sav Blancs and it's been a shame to have that out of a heavy glass beaker really.
The next day we hit the road bright and early and followed the extremely scenic route through Haast Pass and down to lake Wanaka. More on the next blog readers!
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Victoria Mummy Hamv
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Arctic explorers...
This looks like THE most amazing thing you've done - you'll remember this all your lives I'm sure - "Grandpa Bodie" would have been SO proud to see you with ice axe and crampons (even if you did get there by heli rather than sweat)! Love the jacket, too xxx