Westland or should that be 'Wetland’?

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Franz Josef

Our next stop was Franz Josef on the South Island’s West Coast. It’s really only a short distance from Mount Cook National Park, but the Southern Alps form a central spine down the South Island that’s impassable by car for much of its length.

The drive to the West Coast (AKA ‘Westland’) was suitably soggy. The coast bears the brunt of the ‘Roaring Forties’ (i.e. the winds blowing in from the Tasman Sea), which dump about 3.5 metres of annual rainfall there. If that’s not wet enough, the town of Franz Josef gets about 5 metres of rain each year and most of it seemed to be falling on our first night there. We’ve travelled to the other side of the World to find somewhere rainier than Manchester (or even Ramsbottom)!

According to the forecast there wasn’t going to be any improvement for several days so we went ahead and booked a full-day guided walk on the Franz Josef Glacier for the next day.

Bizarrely, the sun came out for most of our glacier walk. The guide told us that we had unusually clear weather - many people can’t even see the valley walls on this trip. The glacier itself gets 15 metres of annual rainfall, although much of it falls as snow, which is part of the reason why the Franz Josef glacier is one of just three glaciers in the world that exists alongside rainforest. Fox Glacier (just 25km down the road from Franz Josef) is another of these ‘warm glaciers’ and the third is in Patagonia, Argentina.

Despite much trepidation on my part, the glacier walk was really good. The hardest part was the walk up the ‘terminal face’ (where the glacier slopes down to the valley floor), but even that was easy enough because of the slowish-pace. There are steps cut in to the ice and there are a whole team of people constantly hacking away with ice-picks to maintain them, but the guides also need to do a bit of carving along the way. We even got our own ice-picks for the day...which was pretty cool if risky.

The best stuff is higher up the glacier….we pulled ourselves through ice tunnels and squeezed through ice-blue crevasses. The new camera got a thorough work-out and so did we. We got back to town just in time for happy hour beers followed by pub fish ‘n’ chips.

West Coast: Continued

The rain began again as we left Franz Josef, so we high-tailed it up the West Coast. We passed through a few bland-feeling towns on our way up the coastal highway and agreed with Lonely Planet that some of the coast looks a lot like California’s magnificent Big Sur (it rained there too!).

Our only real stop was at the Pancake Rocks (‘Punakaiki’), which are supposed to look like stacks of pancakes...bizarre comparison, but it sort of works. The sea has carved gorges and blow-holes in to the rocks and the stormy weather ensured some crashing waves and good sea spray.

We continued on past the huge Buller Gorge - and had our third suicidal bird encounter - (oops) before finally arriving at the unassuming little town of Murchison after 9pm where we stayed at a campsite next to a graveyard...creepy but quiet! It was a bit of an epic drive but worth it to get out of the worst of the weather.

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Photos

Approaching Franz Josef Glacier
Nice togs, eh?

Punakaiki - Pancake Rocks
Water blow hole