Advertisement
Published: November 18th 2010
Sunday 7th November
This morning we travel further down the West Coast before stopping in the township of Hokitka, famous for its local cuisine and treasured Pounamu Jade (greenstone). We stop for breakfast here and browse around a greenstone workshop reading a bit about the history and families involved in the excavation of the stones.
Just a little further down the road we stop at the historic town of Ross where the traces of god rush that brought thousands to the area in the mid 1800’s are still evident. There is a large water filled hole here which was once the centre of mining operations and the locals are currently trying to get the site reopened as there’s 200 million pounds worth of gold still buried all around this area!! Where’s my pan!!!
We pay about 4 pounds each to do a bit of gold panning here and its good fun as some of us do find real gold flakes hidden in our buckets of gravel. I had done panning before and its not long before I’m getting through my gravel and sorting out the stones along the ridges of my pan. The trick is to let the fine
stuff settle as gold is far heavier than stone and should sink to the bottom of your pan as your wash the lighter stones away over the ridges. I panned away and was left with about a dozen gold flakes in the bottom of my pan which I got to keep in my wee bottle along with two bits of jadestone i also found. Its hardly going to make me a millionaire but if i carry on for another 2 years panning away to myself then who knows!! Aww there’s the bus tooting his horn to signal our departure so i guess Ill leave the rest of the gold behind.
We carry on towards Franz Josef and stop for lunch at a hunter’s cafe hidden away in the Westland national park. We are shown around the museum here and shown a video which highlights the problems New Zealand had in the 80’s with Deer. The deer had over populated the area and were causing devastation so they had to start culling them by means of hunting with guns. Due to the large area’s involved and remote mountains they struggled to shift the dead animals so they started to hunt
using helicopters which was very dangerous and some 80 men lost their lives in the process.
Bare in mind they were getting around £400 a deer that they killed hence the great attraction for hunters to use the best means possible such as small helicopters and high powered guns. The video showed us them hunting using these methods and it’s was a bit close to the bone, graphic and almost glorified the killing of deer, hence the reason the guy that runs this place regularly gets hate mail in the post which he has filed on show for anyone to read.
For every letter or email he has received he has written a reply and It’s all a bit controversial to say the least as the pros and cons of culling are a dodgy subject indeed.
Once the deer numbers were low they ceased killing them and instead started to catch them in special nets that were fired from guns from helicopters which is just as dangerous as before.
I suppose in the long run it has worked as they now have 3 million deer in farms and little problems from free range deer. I spoke to the guy that
runs the place as I saw the programme when Billy Connolly came here on his world tour and asked if he’d been to Scotland which he replied he had and loved it. He laughed ‘if only we took a leaf out of Scotland’s book and built fences to keep the deer out rather than build fences to keep them in.’ He’s a strange old man and some of the signs and menus he has on the walls of his cafe/museum kind of sum him up. See photos to see what I mean.
We quickly walked around the back to view his giant hogs basking in the sun and on our way back through the museum we see and touch our first live possum. Their fur is lovely and soft and you can see why they are hunted for their fur. It’s a shame they are destroying the rainforests by eating tree’s at 400 acres a week! A major problem indeed considering they were imported over from Australia where they are not as big a problem as the Australian Eucalyptus tree is too acidic for them to eat.
We’ve arrived at Franz Josef at the base of the Southern Alps,
home of the Franz Josef Glacier and neighbouring Fox Glacier located within in the Western National Park.
We have booked ourselves onto a Franz Josef Glacier tour which involves a helicopter tour from the town up to the glacier, a two and a half hour hike around and then a helicopter back down.
We arrive at the heli tours base just 100 metres around the corner from the YHA and are given our tickets and introduced to our guide who would take us too the take off and landing area. Here we would be kitted out in waterproofs, socks, hats , gloves and hiking boots. We are also giving a bag which contained our clampons which will be needed as we will be walking on ice for at least two hours.
We sit and as we wait we are given the basics of safety procedures and also we are told a little bit of history of the area. We hear the roar of rotor blades approaching and turn to see our chopper coming in to land with a full load. We are instructed to board the craft when given the signal and in true form we are
first to the heli and told to jump in the front seats. Here we go again!!
Once the other 4 passengers hopped in behind us we are off and flying upwards towards the mountains. Almost instantly we can see the whole town of Franz Josef and a few moments more we skim over a hill and see the start of the Franz Josef Glacier. Travelling at one hundred miles a hour and only a few hundred feet above the mountains is quite a thrill in itself and we start to see the sheer size of the glacier in its full glory. There is some snow on the tips of the higher Mountains and beyond the crest of the valley its a total whiteout as this area is called the accumulation zone.
The Franz Josef is 12 km long located in Westland National Park on the West Coast of New Zealand's South Island. Together with the Fox Glacier 20 km to the south, it is unique in descending from the Southern Alps to less than 300 metres above sea level, amidst the greenery and lushness of a temperate rainforest.
The glacier was named after Emperor Franz Joseph I
of Austria by the German explorer, Julius von Haast in 1865.
The accumulation zone is a caldera type crater in which most of the snow, from these high mountains, ends up and builds up until it full of snow. Because of the high amount of snow the weight has compacted the snow into ice and forms a large ice cube, a glacier! Gravity takes over and slowly the glacier makes it way down the valley at a speeds of up to eight metres a day in the summer and at around one metre a day in the winter.
The visibility is better than we expected as its patchy clouds with the odd burst of sunshine which makes us realise we should’ve taken our shades up with us. We are now seeing all kinds of wonderful colours of blue and also some of the ice rocks and crevices which can be seen from up here look totally awesome!
The pilot takes us further up and higher up above the mountains and begins to circle around the valley that holds the Glacier and as he nearly completes a second fly around he proceeds to drop us into the narrow
valley and slows the helicopter down and proceeds to land on top of the glacier.
As we are descending we spot a few little dots of people waiting for us and its then you realise the sheer scale of Franz Josef Glacier.
We land and as we gingerly climb out and stand away from the helicopter the people that were waiting board and are taken off the ice and back home. We are left standing in our waterproofs and are introduced to Steve our tour guide who is in fact from the Manchester area. He gives us a quick demo on putting the clampons on and also explains a few do’s and don’ts.
Once the formalities have been done he tells us a little bit about the glacier and highlights a brief description of various ice formations and where we will be travelling today.
So we’re off and walking with Steve who is carrying a large iron ice pick leading the way. We clamber up steep ice banks and hop over little streams of water until we come to a very steep bank in which Steve proceeds to cut some steps for us using his pick. The seven of
us are now up on top some large ice blocks and still walking onwards. We hear the rushing sound of water getting louder and we stop and a large ice hole which has been formed by melting water.
Its looks menacing looking down into the hole as its dark and you can’t see the bottom . There are crevices all over the place buts its safe enough if you follow your lead and keep focused on the stepping areas. We stop at some really nice aqua blue pools and also some nice ice formations as we keep on plodding onwards taking it all in, it really is amazing to be walking on a glacier.
Eventually we come across some caves and we walk through a couple which is really weird as the sounds of the scraping of your boots echos through the ice and little drips of water often bounce off your head and shoulders.
As we left the cave it became apparent that the weather was starting to close in as the clouds had dropped to about 800 metres which is not good news for the helicopter who can only fly under a 500 metre cloud. Our guide steve
has radioed in our positions and requested a weather update further down the hill in which the reply was that a low pressure cloud was moving in on the valley.
We have been hiking for over two hours now so its time to call in the helicopter so we make our way down the glacier towards the pick up point about ¼ mile down the ice. We are fairly picking up speed as we walk downwards as it now obvious that the weather is steadily getting worse and the clouds are obscuring much of the valley.
It looks impossible for a helicopter to come and find us but as we arrived at the landing area we heard the whirring of distant rotors. Time to get the Crampons off! There’s a pefect cloudline as you look down the valley and out of nowhere a helicopter pops out of the cloud and gently comes in sideways and lands 25ft away from us. Being blown about by down draft we eagerly board the helicopter and get buckled up and with the slam of the door behind us we are up and away.
The pilot circles up the glacier and back down to give
us one last look at the magnificent Franz Josef Glacier and its not long before we hit a patch of cloud for a matter of seconds, come out the other side and realise we are already halfway down the valley.
It was probually better sitting in the back seats now as on the way down we see lots of waterfalls and really cool rock formations which we missed on the way up. We view the Waiho river mouth leading out to the Tasman Sea as we circle in to land. The weather is fine now when we land and as we walk along the path in the sun we can see the white and grey mass of clouds covering the uppermost areas of the mountains above us and wonder if we really just came from up there!
Still buzzing from the hike we walk back to our hostel where I quickly knocked up some fine dinner for us both and then we met our Irish friends for beers at the local log cabin aptly called the Blue Ice Bar! It was happy hour so its fine to have a couple of full pints of Monkeith’s Golden lager to really
taste it and its actually quite smooth. On the advice of the Maori barman I try some Tui beer which is a local microbrewery beer and it was lush to say the least. Microbrewery’s are popular in NZ and OZ as they aren’t mainstream and are brewed locally for local bars only.
They have a free pool table here so we played pool until the locals started to fill the bar up and got a bit noisy so we called it a night and headed home happy as fluffy ducks! ‘Sweet as’!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.168s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 14; qc: 69; dbt: 0.0857s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
ootyresort
non-member comment
Ooty Resorts, Coonoor resorts, Coonoor homestay, ooty homestay
Good post .. I like this very much, very useful for me .. if you have a little time, you can visit my website.. Welcome to stay in Ooty Resort at the Great grandfather’s Ooty home stay nestled in the Niligiri Hill Coonoor Resort in of south India.Read More.. Ooty Resort thanks for sharing ..