We arrived at Fox Glacier (mints - ha ha!) Saturday morning and were very happy to see the sun shining! This area is notorious for the very high rainfall of about 5m per year! Although at the top of the glacier in the high Southern Alps they record rainfall (generally as snow!) at 12m per year! That is why the glaciers are here and running down into tropical rainforest areas, a crazy phenomenon!

We saw the Fox Glacier from its viewpoint and walked to the terminal face. Its hard to imagine it is ice and moving, all be it very slowly, about 100,000 times slower than a river! The ice just looks like massive rocks from a distance!

We then went to walk around Lake Matheson and even got a few of those famous shots of Mt Cook and Mt Tasman reflected in the small still lake, although it was still pretty cloudy!

Then the rain started and i dont think it has hardly stopped since! It was so heavy it even stopped Andrew from going to look at a gold dredger on Gillespies Beach, which is a famous old gold mining area!

So we headed up to Franz Josef, still in the rain to get ready for our guided glacier walk tomorrow, the weather was not looking good for it and we had to accept that we were going to get very wet! Andrew was so excited about it though he could hardly sit still. I on the other hand was quite nervous, they say it is quite a strenuous day and I have never done anything like this before!

Sunday morning we were up at the crack of dawn and in the pub to watch the rugby and are we glad we did!!! We cannot believe that England are in the Rugby World Cup final (although against South Africa its not looking good!) England may not have played a pretty game of rugby but it was effective and we beat the French!!!! Even the sun came out, all be it briefly, as the final whistle blew!

We raced up to the Glacier Guiding company (the rugby had meant we were half an hour late!) and got kitted up in hat, gloves, waterproof coat and trousers and boots, then we were on a bus to the Franz Josef Glacier. There were about 30 people doing the full day glacier adventure but they split us up into three groups, we went in the middle group seeming Andrew was confident and i was not.

Then we put on our ice talons, donned our ice axes and headed up into the middle of the glacier. It was quite a steep climb up onto the glacier, it is so big you cannot really get the perspective of it until you see other people as little dots on the ice! We had a great guide who took us around the glacier, up and down over the ice. The scenery is crazy, lots of crevasses which we had to squeeze through and lots of crazy ice formations. The ice was so blue in places, Andrew tried to convince me it came from blue snow - I'm not that stupid!

It was a great day, the weather was wet but at least only in showers so we had some dry periods! It was a lot easier than I expected, i was not tired by the end of the day, so I am surprised at my fitness because other people in the group were really struggling! Andrew wishes he had done the ice climbing as well - maybe next time!

Only a week left in NZ now and we have to change our bus and ferry from Christchurch to Wellington for next Sunday so we can watch the Rugby World Cup final - come on England, can we retain the trophy?!?!

Lots of Love

Sarah and Andrew xxx