Look Ma, I'm a mountaineer!

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Dear friends and family,

Destination from Nelson: Franz Joseph Glacier
Ahoy ya'll! New Zealand truly is a land of contrasts and variety. The day after leaving the sunny land of Nelson/Marlborough, I found myself climbing ICE! Yes, I hopped on the Magic Bus and headed down the West Coast, more of God's country.
The Southern Alps run down the backbone of the South Island defining and isolating the West Coast. It's a narrow, rugged strip of land barely more than 20 miles wide all the way down, filled with wild rivers, lush temperate rainforest and crystal lakes. It's enough to make an old woman blush and a young girl squeal!
Our Magic driver Pop Star was in a surly mood that day, allowing us poor, wretched passengers only a short time to view the stunning scenery. Which is fine by me, because I ended up stuck next to a 40-something Mormon lady who picked at her blueberry muffins and murmured to herself.
"Nice crumbly texture in the cake," she'd say. "Wish I were bobbing around on the waves down there. Why doesn't she call me, the little brat?"
All the way down the coast, the magical bus huffed its way through little towns with Maori names like Hokitika and Punakaiki. Seems the only thing that keeps the economy purring here is their specialization of New Zealand green jade carvings. It's all over the place, but I bought my pendant from an old Maori carver/artist named Steve. He had a wooden leg and sold it to me on credit (the pendant, not his leg) bless his trusting soul.
Okay, here's the real fun. A few days after leaving Abel Tasman, we landed at Franz Joseph, the village named after the glacier at whose feet it knealt. Science lesson 1: Glaciers are basically frozen rivers formed by snowfall high in the mountains. This snowfall freezes and gradually compacts to form clear blue ice in the higher elevations. It's totally awesome.
And that's why I had to try ice climbing. That massive blob of cold stuff was just begging me to stick spikes in it, corraling its majesty in every possible way. (I actually feel sorry for the glacier, with tons of people tramping all over it, flying their crazy helicopters around it like drunken mosquitos. At least there's a law saying that you have to carry your, um, excrement off the glacier in a plastic baggie. Millions of years of evolution for this...)
Climbing vertical cliffs of ice is a mind-f*** for sure. The higher you go, even though you're harnessed and with experienced guides, the scarier it becomes. You carry two picks like the grim reaper and run around with these nasty-looking spikes on your boots called "crampons" which grip the ice while walking and stab the cliffsides while climbing.
So there I was, pick-picking and kicking my way to the top of a 40-foot-high block of ice. It (the ice) was pissed from the abuse and started to play with my head. As I neared the apex, a surge of FEAR took over my body. My leg shook like the needle on a sewing machine. All I could hear was my breathing and pulse and what it would be like to die.
So sorry, I get carried away with dramatics, but the adrenaline rush was out of this world! All in all, it was a worthwhile outing. When I got back into town, I was starving and scarfed down dinner like a madwoman.
Which brings me to the subject of KIWI FOOD. It's BORING! Everything edible is stuffed between two pieces of bread or baked into some unrecognizable form. To say it's awful would be wrong, really. More like terribly unimaginative and mind-numbing.
One thing the Kiwis really know how to do, though, is ice cream. Boysenberry ice cream. Mmmm....
Next stop, Queenstown. Adrenaline capital of the world. Yee-haw! Some meat-bombing coming up.

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Photos

Jublilation
Mountain air makes me feel like I'm on coke. Not that I've tried coke.

Scaling ice
Kinda scary...not something humans were meant to do, methinks.

Bitchin' boots
And ya'll thought that leather stiletto boots were cool!

Long way down
Alone on the frontier, staring teary eyed into the wilderness. Sob!