The Alex & The Eleanor + 1

Sunday January 6, 2008

Punakaiki to Fox Glacier

Sunny and nice

We have a relatively early start as we have a goal today. But of course, there is time to stop en route at the ‘make your own knife place’. Sadly it is an all day thing, which is something we do not have. Instead we press forward, a very pretty drive along the coast for a while, with big dramatic cliffs and crashing waves. It looks a lot more like Maine to me, which makes the extremely warm weather a bit weird. The water however, is as cold as Maine; when I went to get my toes wet at the beach, an exceptional wave surprised me and I got soaked to mid thigh. Luckily another pair of shorts was readily available.

The other thing of note is the water color – here it is grey, but back at Abel Tasman, not 4 hours away, its turquoise like the best Caribbean or even (but not really) Bora Bora. Ahh New Zealand, it’s a good thing everything is so close, cause the roads are scary. But onwards we drive, down the coast, stopping at Franz Joseph (the “other glacier” – much more commercially guided) for lunch (fish and chips again, you see a trend yet? They make very good, consistent fish and chips here – Blue Cod is the fish they use and its most excellent).

We get into Fox – as far as I can tell, the towns are names the same as the glaciers – and check into our hotel for a quick breath and change and then the long 30 sec walk into town for our heli-hike. We get loaded into buses for the short ride to the heli-pad and get a safety briefing – more about the helicopters then the glacier, and get some wool socks and sturdy leather hiking boots and …. wait for a while. There are about 24 people and 2 helicopters that seat 6 each. And this is the less crowded glacier? Luckily it’s a very short flight so before long we are loaded in and I am sitting in the front window seat. I think it’s a score for photos, and it is, until we have to circle a bit waiting to land on the ice, and the pilot decides to go looking for mountain goats, which is all swooping and diving and tight little turns, and all of a sudden I am not so fond of the front window seat, although the views were awesome. No goats though. We land, and get our crampons and get divided up into a 10 person group and head out. Very slowly. Its awesome to look around, the layers in the ice and the blueness of it, and the contrast between the ice and the mountains besides us, and of course you can never underestimate the dangers up there, but my mom could walk at this speed (sorry Mom). I think our guide tried to make up for it a bit by letting those of us who wanted to go through some ice caves, which are very and cold, and if people have slide though before you, very wet. They are also very blue, which is really cool. And cold, although not as cold as I would have expected. It doesn’t help that our strong of perfect weather has finally broken and big heavy clouds have rolled in, right on top of the mountains besides us in some cases. They say it can be quite warm when its sunny, although I am not sure how much I trust their idea of warm. We saw many cool features, rivers and crevasses and deep pools and although I wished we could have moved a bit faster and seen a bit more, it was really cool. Another helicopter ride back down and a quick ride to town.

Then the important bit – finding dinner. Although I have read horrors of West Coast food, we managed to find some rather tasty dinner – I had a nice salad and Alex had the worlds largest whitebait omelette. Seriously – this was a large 3 egger, with lots and lots of whitebait. And this was a starter. They offered it as a main as well and I can only imagine the size of it. It actually managed to turn Alex off of whitebait. We split a pizza for our main – bacon, chorizo and tomato, which was pretty good, but the Kiwi crust is not my thing, its almost cracker like – not to my taste. We returned to the hotel and crashed – long drive tomorrow!