Fox Fever, Milk cartoon rooms and Rainy Day

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Three months to the day since we left the last days of summer in BC to come around the world to some beautiful areas. We left Oamaru on the east coast of the south island with a new found friend and decided to finally camp our way in NZ. We hopped in the little black car and headed south, within an hour and a half we were in Dunedin looking at the town, crowds and enjoying some great food before pushing on towards invercargill on the Southern tip of NZ. Gregg had to stop just outside of Oamaru to drop off some wine from a vineyard that he worked at in Christchurch so we were granted the pleasure of meeting a great weaver and were told that Invercargill was once called the A**hole of the world. However, upon reaching our camp site for night one of the road trip we all decided that this was not a legit decision on the matter of Invercargill. The beach here was gorgeous and stretched on for miles and miles of hardpacked sand and beautiful waves that were crashing near the shore to the absolute love of some local surfers. It was here that we met three surf locals who had the lovely job of surfing on new boards for a local company to test them out.. a rather amazing job if I may say so.


With a plan in our mind and a need to get to Fox Glacier by Saturday afternoon we headed north out of invercargill (the only direction able to go unless one wanted to go to Bluff and then onto stewart Island) towards Queenstown. It was here that we fdound majority of the young people in NZ and where we realized that with little money to spend there we would need to push on with our travels. Our camp site number two was beautiful. My hammock was strung between a giant birch tree and the back of Gregg's car where I had the best sleep of the trip except perhaps a sleep on a sleeper train throughout Thailand and the rolling of the train lulls everyone into a peacefull sleep. Allison's hammock hung nearby running from the tree to the fence in a makeshift application of our ingenious plans of no tents and only the glory of the Hennessy Hammock.

After a couple beers some dinner over the camp stove and some beach time an amazing night of sleep settled over me in my hammock. We awoke early to clean up our campsite, throw our bags back in the car and strap in Alf (my backpack) into the back seat so that who ever sat in the back was squashed by the life sized backpack sitting beside them. We weaved through the moutainous roads between Queesntown and Haast. A six hour trek was lengthened by the breaking down of our Gregg's car as it over heated and we waited just before a bridge that covered a swamp and no one around for miles. We cleared the first breakdown with little troubles until we were 50kms outside of Fox Glacier and had the pleasure of breaking down once more before we were released into the grasps of fox glacier.

The one street town is a small tourist town based on the west coast that is all about the glacier and is full of cafes. With no library, no atms that take foreign bank cards and everyone being aware that we arrived here within a few hours we knew we would fit right in here. We took a nice stroll to the Glacier that was said to take 30 minutes when in reality it took a mere 15 minutes. We hiked out to the base of the Glacier in a torrential downpour ( the natural state for the rainforest I suppose) viewed the glacier, noted everyone else had bailed on the walk early into the storm and turned to make the walk back to the parking lot.

The glacier, while not particularly huge when compared to some of the glaciers back home in Canada, was beautifully stark in comparison to the ferns and rainforest environment surrounding the region. The constant changing of the valley basin where the melted glacier water pools was a sight of contrast again as the beautiful blue stood out even more in the muddy trails and rainy atmosphere. As the pictures show the trail could quickly become dangerous and the water was already trickling over the path and washing away sections when we were making our retreat from the Glacier.



Fox Glacier is a town where you are either a local or a worker and you go out to the pub and meet majority of the town on any given night. The tourists change over regularly with little chance of staying more than a couple nights. The area is lush with beautiful trees and the area pulls on strings of the heart with its mists that dance over the mountains and forests. On a clear day you can see the mountains with such clarity that it presses peace into ones soul. We were welcomed to the town and seemed to be of some interest that new people had arrived as many knew of our arrival and that two new Canadian girls were present in town to work. Days go oddly quickly here between walks, work and reading. I do believe that I have read more books this trip that I can relay and yet each new book seems to draw me in deeper and deeper and it always surprises me when I glance up from the book I'm reading and have to re-adjust to the beauty of the place I am in. We have not moved any further north from Fox Glacier, or at least I have not as Allison went to Greymouth with two of our roommates for shopping and we tried to go to Franz Joesph the second day we were here but were quickly shut down as Gregg's car lost power on a hill and we had to push it and coast back to a shop in town to get it fixed and wait a week to find out that the cam belt, the cam seals and another belt all busted. After a night at the pub, meeting of interesting locals, some milk crate memories and a stroll on a grassy knoll we are taking a break from the pub in Fox Glacier to just enjoy it's beauty, the peace of the town and the thumping of all the helicopter flights that drown on in the distant with tourists getting aerial views of the glaciers. With the rainforest location that we have chosen to settle into for a couple months comes the obvious rain and oh how the rain has come. Within less than 24 hours 250 mm of rain came down upon the town and there was little change in between the days since. In a rainforest mountain I sit looking at the peacefulness of my soul settling into a bueatiful locale that my words can never do justice to in descriptions.

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Comments

[melina]

Aly!! very nice blog!!! and beautiful pics!!!!