Water, water everywhere

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That title is also from Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, when the shipwrecked sailors are dying of thirst in a lifeboat. Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. In my case it was all drinkable but I didn't want it. I came to the tiny town of Franz Joseph to see its eponymous glacier, named after the Austrian Emperor who reigned from 1848 to 1916. But, like most places here with a European name, there is an earlier name and a story behind it. Maoris call it Ka Roimata o Hine Hukatere, or Tears of the Avalanche Girl. The legend is that a girl lost her lover who fell from a local peak and her flood of tears froze to form the glacier.

I think she was still crying when I was here because the rain just didn't let up. Water from the sky, snow on the peaks that I couldn't see because of the heavy mist, ice in the glacier: it was all hydrogen dioxide everywhere. Drinkable, sure, but useless from a tourist's point of view without sunshine. I spoke to some who'd paid for a guided tour and, determined to get their money's worth, had gone for a half-day hike on the glacier. They said they didn't see anything and got soaking wet and cold. I may have been bored staying in the hostel, but at least I was dry, although warm was another matter.

Amazingly, the glacier comes down to 200 feet above sea level. That wouldn't be surprising in Greenland or Antarctica, but New Zealand? It seems that the amount of rain this place gets lies behind the explanation. I heard various figures ranging between 5 and 9 metres of rain per year. That much rain comes down as snow up at the nevis, where the glacier forms. The snow compacts into ice and flows down its valley (ice being water that's solidified, a glacier behaves at slow speed in the same way a river does). This glacier can move at up to 16 metres per day, so no surprise that it gets so close to sea level.

On the second morning I woke to clearer skies and snow quite low down on the pine-covered hills surrounding the village. Looked like a good day to visit the glacier but my bus left at 08h00 with me on it. Franz Joseph will have to wait until next time I'm in this part of the world.

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