Maverick and Goose do Franz Josef

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We were up at the crack of dawn again and off on the bus again, this time to the Franz Josef glacier along the west coast of the South island. On the way we stopped off at the Ross Goldfields for a spot of gold panning. We didn’t do that as it cost precious New Zealand Dollars although the highlight was definitely the boring old lady telling us all about it, kind of. On describing the gold panning she said "There's an interesting story behind the goldfields actually..... it tells you all about it on the wall over there". Oh, thanks love! Another stop off was at the Bushman's Centre, run by this bearded yokel called Pete who ate roadkill, ran the Puke Pub that sold possum pie and used to catch deer by hanging off a helicopter and diving on the deer when the helicopter was low enough to sprinting Bambi! The guy was a lunatic but quite funny. He even kept the biggest pig I've ever seen, and that's coming from someone who's been out on the town in both Great Yarmouth and Derby!

So, the Franz Josef Glacier was quality! We'd had great weather the whole way round the island and here was no different. There was no cloud covering the glacier itself, which looked huge. You had the option of a half or full day hike up to the glacier or getting a helicopter up to the best part of the glacier! Despite her protests, Lizzie finally agreed to borrow the money from Mr. Visa and splash out on the heli-hike, which was absolutely awesome. We managed to get ourselves in the front of the helicopter for the flight up to the top. This was one of the best things we'd ever done. I wanted to hang off the bottom and go hunting for deer, but that was for another time. For now, we enjoyed our ride up to the glacier, where we hiked around with crampons, ice picks and a group of brummies for a couple of hours! We went in and out of caves, trying not to fall down crevasses, although clumsy boy here did manage to drop his foot in a few pools of ice cold water.

After maneuvering round small rivers, pools and caves it was back into the helicopter where Goose (Lizzie) was again in the front seat, although Maverick was demoted to the window seat in the back. Not sure the pilot trusted me around the controls, although I did have the pleasure of one of the brummie lads who was scared of flying, grip my knee so hard when we banked to miss the cliff side, that I honestly thought he'd had lessons from Muhammad I'm Hard Bruce Lee.

We stuffed ourselves with pizzas and jars of Tui in full view of the glacier before spending another day chilling out and enjoying more free soup!!! The night before we left for our next destination, we went for a walk into the darkness of the woods to see some glow worms! This was entertaining enough as Lizzie had watched The Ring (a horror movie) about two hours before, so she was duly shitting herself!!! We did see some glow worms anyway, which was like looking up at the stars. Very weird!

In the morning we were to set off with blue mohican clad bus driver Scotty for Lake Wanaka, where we would spend two nights!!!

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Photos

Franz Josef Glacier
From the air!

Helicopter dropping the first group off
(gives you an idea of how big the glacier is)