Chilly but awesome

It’s just possible that NZ has outdone itself here and in terms of scenery we hit the peak – quite literally.

From Wanaka we travelled up the West Coast to Franz Josef. It rained solidly for the entire day. So what I hear you say, it rains all the time in England. But here they can get as much rain in one day as the UK sees in an entire year, so this was the mother of all pissing-it-downs. We wanted to do a helicopter flight across the mountain ranges and were told there was little chance – so that night your intrepid explorers went to bed very grumpy. The next morning felt like Christmas, you know when you’ve hoped it snowed over night, except this time we wanted clear skies. We were too scared to look out of the window but karma was with us and things looked good, however to take advantage of our meteorological good fortune we decided against just the flight and did a heli-hike instead. So we got a nice scenic trip on a helicopter which was amazing, a lot less scary then a plane and more like a rollercoaster ride – especially when you’re crazy Scottish pilot insisted on dive bombing the mountain trees.

But the best came soon after, the helicopter actually landed ON the glacier! It was bloody awesome, the whole world seemed silent and still, the only noises were the crunch of our boots on fresh snow and the sound of rocks falling in the foothills. I can’t describe how cool it was to hike across something as huge as a glacier, this is literally a huge block of ice the size of Auckland and over 300 metres thick – and it’s constantly moving! There’d been a fresh ice slide overnight, so there were these amazing clumps of ice so pure that they were blue. Even though it was all ice up there, it didn’t seem too cold and our guide, Peter from Prague, did the whole thing in just shorts and a fleece. Despite some ridiculous outfits, this was the most amazing thing we’ve done (yeah I know I’ve said that before) and I can’t imagine it getting better.


After a truly amazing day, we travelled up the west coast and over Lewis Pass, which was very high and very scenic – it started raining at the bottom and was snowing by the time we got up to top, to give you an idea of the height we climbed (about 2/3 of a mile)! Our destination was Hanmer , which is famous for its natural hot springs in an alpine setting. The springs were like giant bath, a bit stinky around the sulphur pools, but very relaxing and well deserved after a day of hiking. Hopefully we’ll get some more natural hot water action up in Rotorua on the north island.