Fox Glacier

Yesterday we headed out of Queenstown for Fox Glacier, where we were scheduled to go on a half-day hike up onto the glacier (the Kiwis pronounce glacier "glace-ier" rather than "glaysher").

On our way out of Queenstown, we spotted a hitchhiker holding a sign for Wanaka, which was the first major stop on our projected five hours of driving for the day. On a spur of the moment, we decided to pull over and give her a lift. After shifting the debris in the back seat a bit, we made room for her and were off to Wanaka.

Jane, as she is called, is a sound engineer from London that has been spending the last couple of months travelling around NZ as she felt the whim. We had a fascinating discussion with her during the hour long trip to Wanaka and dropped her off before we looked for parking and lunch.

Just outside of Wanaka, as we entered the city, was an establishment that we could not help but visit: Puzzling World. Inside there were several rooms devoted to really impressive optical illusions and a room of cool holographic photos. Outside was a rather impressive two floor maze (the second floor consisted of a series of bridges connecting distant parts of the maze).

The maze had four color coded towers and the challenge for the maze was to find all four towers (in any order for the easy challenge or in a specific order for the hard challenge) and then find the way out. We chose to do the easy challenge, as we still had four hours of driving to go, which was listed as taking 30 to 60 minutes. After some frustration with the dastardly green tower, we made it out in a quite respectible 45 minutes.

The next four hours were pretty much straight driving, with Jen and I trading off driving duties. We stopped briefly to walk up to the Thunder Falls and again to catch the sun setting over the Tasman Sea. There was a near miss with a Pukeko and an incident with an opposum and our right front wheel (that one was for the kiwis and other endangered flightless birds of NZ) after night fell. Our current accommidation is the Misty Mountains Lodge, a lovely little B&B just on the edge of the Fox Glacier township. We have not seen any hobbits or dwarves yet, but I am still optimistic.

On the recommendation of the proprietress, we went to a little restaurant called The Platau. The food was great: I had chorzo sausage, feta cheese, and mushrooms on penne and Jen had NZ green lipped muscles in a chili-ginger-lime sauce. We both tried a new (for us) brand of beer: Moa. Jen had the Moa Blanc (a spicey wheat beer) and I had the Moa Noir (a very chocolately dark ale). Both were excellent, bottle-fermented brews.

We were up early this morning for breakfast (standard fare: fried eggs, bacon, sausage, grilled mushrooms and tomatoes - the Kiwis know how to do breakfast) and then were off to the guide station to begin our hike.

Our tour gide was a former Mt. Everest sherpa from Nepal named Passang who was quite entertaining and hopped about the steep, narrow, rocky, wet, slippery trails like some sort of spry mountain alpaca. Or possibly a sherpa. The glacier itself was spectacular; we got to hike out onto it with crampons strapped onto our boots and specially made walking sticks (they had a metal bit at the end to stab into the ice) to assist us.

The trail (parts of it barely qualify for the word, but I'm feeling generous today) was quite difficult in places and the company that ran the tours had people out rebuilding parts of the trail that had recently been destroyed by landslides or flash floods. Jen and I will both be quite sore tomorrow. Fortunately, we only have a relaxing three and a half hour drive to Greymouth and then an alpine train back to Christchurch scheduled for tomorrow.

We'll post some pictures of the glacier when we get internet access from the laptop, we're using the computer in the B&B front room right now.