Bonjour-Mundo!

After our wine tour Em and I have made our way down the west coast of New Zealands south island.  Apparently the entire west coast of the south island has been declared a world heritage site by UNESCO, and for good reason. The scenary is beautiful. Towering, majestic mountains on one side, go around the corner, powerful surf crashing into the beaches. It was nothing short of incredible. I enjoyed the long bus ride just watching the landscapes pass us by.

On our way south we spent one night in the little crafts town of Hokitika. Nothing too exciting, pretty deserted hostel, but lots and lots of jade…most of it unfortunately out of our budget. Who knew a little sculpture of greenstone could retail for 5-11,000 dollars? There was a lovely beach to stroll down though, and a delicious fudge shop. Always room for chocolate. 🙂

After Hokitika, we made our way furth south along the coast to the little village of Fox. The township exists we are told, for one reason, the Fox Glacier, the reason we came. There are two main glaciers that tourists come to see in New Zealand, one is the Franz Joseph, and the other is Fox. Fox is the bigger of the two and by far cheaper to explore, so we went with that one.

We signed on for a full day walking tour with Alpine Guides and set out around 9:30 yesterday morning. The gave us boots, full crampons (metal spikes that you attatch to the bottom of your boots, and yes there are half crampons), and extra wool socks. Even with two pairs of wool socks, my feet still froze though, shoot. Anyhow, they drove us out about 15 minutes to the front of the glacier area. It starts way up in the mountains, but then curves a river of ice down into the valley below. The landscape is gorgeous. Snowcapped mountains falling into temperate rainforest below. A powder blue glacial river runs from the head of the glacier out into the valley.

We hiked uphill through the rainforest area and then came onto the glacier a little past the front. There we stopped to attach our crampons, and onto the ice we went. The glacier itself is enormous. The people we could see walking around on it looked miniscule. There were steps carved into the ice for the most part, but in other places our guides hacked away with ice axes to make out a track. We had about 3 hours on the ice, and it was amazing. For sure an experience like none other. The glacier was beautiful, something you might not always expect I suppose from a big hunk of ice.  The curves of the crevasses and towering peaks were really magnificent. Lots of great pictures. We hiked up and down and around and through crevasses, some so narrow girly hips don’t exactly easily fit! Also, the ice is actually blue! Something I never expected. Apparently, according to our guide, the ice of the glacier is under so much pressure that it squeezes out all the air, the causes it to be super dense and actually refract the light differently turning it a shade of powder blue.

For now we have made our way to Wanaka, a cute little ski town. We’ll be hitting the slopes tomorrow, then it’s off to Queenstown where we apparently will be making it just in time for the annual winterfest mardi gras parade! This could be trouble….We’ll keep you posted!

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 24th, 2006 at 8:14 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.