Franz Josef

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20/06/09 Saturday Day 309
Another early start this morning. Got the bus at 7.15am. Arrived into Franz Josef around 5pm. After checking in we checked out the town. It’s a tiny place. It’s basically got the main road and a parallel road to the main road. There’s loads of accommodation here and restaurants. The only thing to do here really is do a hike up the glacier, which we are doing tomorrow. Being a Saturday night you might think that it would be busy here. It wasn’t! All the pubs were pretty dead with only a hand full of people in them.
21/06/09 Sunday Day 310
After going to the tour place at 8.15am, we got all our gear which included overpants, a waterproof jacket, boots, crampons, socks and gloves. Once that was done we all headed on the bus to take the 5k trip to the glacier car park. We then had another 10 minutes walk through the forest to get to the massive river bed in front of the glacier. From here we split into 3 groups. There was about 30 of us altogether. Group 1 were the fast and serious group, not much hanging around and only small steps carved out on the ice for them. Group 3 was for the people who wanted to take their time with the biggest steps carved out for them. Group 2 then was in the middle of these two. We went for this group because group 3 turned out to be as slow as a wet week! Anywho we set off through the river bed of rocks and stones. This “little” walk was about 2.5 kilometre to get to the base of the glacier. It looks closer than it actually seems. Once we got to the base we put on the crampons on our boots. These are basically blunt spikes that help with gripping the ice. Then we split up into the 3 groups. It just so happened that there was 10 in our group, me and Emer, another couple from Holland and the rest were made up of a mad bunch of Irish girls. The glacier was class. There were some steep steps to go up and down along the way. Some of these stairs had a rope to help but some of them didn’t. Every so often we stopped for a break to catch our breath. It wasn’t a difficult hike anyway, especially after we doing the 71k Queen Charlotte Track. We went through a few small caves that were naturally made. There was also some really tight squeezes to get through, so much so that you weren’t able to put one foot in front of the other. The trip back down from the glacier was a lot easier than going up. Going up took about 4 hours and going down took about 2 hours. The walk from the base of the glacier to the bus seemed to take ages! It wasn’t very cold up there; I suppose that’s mainly because you’re constantly on the move.
Once we got back we had a bite to eat in the hostel and headed out for a few sociables.
So that was Franz Josef. A lovely small place and the glacier hike is class. A definite must to do in the south island. Tomorrow we’re on another long bus journey to Queenstown.

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