Franz Josef Glacier, New Zealand

Wow - has it been a week since I arrived in New Zealand already? (Pedantic answer: no, only 6 days.) Despite what I said in my previous entry, I've still spent large amounts of time figuring out what to do while I'm here - but I'll tell you about those once I've been there.

From Christchurch (which is inexplicably shortened to "Ch-Ch" despite there being three "ch"s in it) I took the train across the Southern Alps to the small town of Greymouth on the west coast. Compared to the last long train ride I took, this one was:

(a) Rather a lot shorter (a mere 4 hours); and

(b) Much more scenic (the train even has a grandly titled "viewing platform", which to me looked like a carriage with no windows).

All in all, an enjoyable journey, even if it did mean getting up at 6:30. I spent two nights in Greymouth, which on reflection was approximately two nights too many. If you're interested in the fishing industry, then I suppose you could spend time here - but you could also spend time in Grimsby, which would provide about the same level of entertainment. I've never been a fan of towns which seem to exist purely because they're at the end of a railway, or have a junction nearby. It's a nice little town, don't get me wrong, and you can walk around it in about half an hour. Ironically (or perhaps annoyingly) that is about the amount of time I would have had had I caught a connecting bus from the train when I first arrived!

The bus that I did catch was the connecting bus, and so I could laugh quietly at all the people just arriving in the town and expecting a tourist paradise. I used my bus Flexi-pass for the first time (and it is flexible: it's made of cardboard) to travel down the coast a few hundred km to the tourist township at Franz Josef Glacier, which is named after an Austrian emperor of the same name (that's Franz Josef, by the way, not Josef Glacier... a nice name for a superhero perhaps?). You can do all sorts of things related to the glacier here, although all of them involve walking on it at some point. You can go up in a helicopter to the top and walk around it, or you can take a bus to where the end used to be 50 years ago before the glacier started receding rapidly. Apparently it's a very active and responsive glacier: the length of it depends on the snowfall about 5 years previously, compared to about 20 for an average glacier. It's also unique in that it ends only 300m above sea level in a temperate rainforest. I get the feeling that it's a very Kiwi thing to base so much around it. I'm only surprised that you can't do skydiving or bungy jumping here!

My organised glacier walk cost $60 which is a pretty good deal for a 5 hour trip. Once you've got there though and walked up to the glacier itself you end up with about 2 hours on the ice. Thankfully they split up the group so that the ol- I mean, slower people can go at their own pace while those "more confident" can go further up. Even so, we barely touched the length of the glacier. It was a good trip and seeing in reality some things that I'd previously only seen in school textbooks was nice. I could almost pretend that this trip is a Geography Field Trip...

My next week will see me spending almost every night in a different place, as thanks to busy hostels and restrictive bus timetables I've distorted the planned elegant loop of the South Island to a weird figure-of-eight. I only hope I can remember where I'm supposed to go every day.