Hi folks!

After an interesting night fighting sand flies we arrived ready to hike Fox Glacier! Our poor campervan Bob has been doing a great job making it up and down all these mountains so we were glad to finally be giving it a day's rest!

Today was all about walking! After getting kitted out with our boots, waterproofs, hat, mittens, over trousers and crampons…(Spikes for your boots to grip the ice) we climbed onboard the retro Fox Glacier bus, which was cool! The glacier itself is only about 3km out of the town, however because its terminal face is so unstable you have to access it from the side.

I don't know how exactly I was expecting to get onto the glacier, but for some reason the 800 vertical climb steps into the forest came as a slight shock! The climb up wasn't all that bad as we got to refill our water bottles in a natural spring waterfall and it tasted beautiful :) we also had some fantastic views out over the glacier from above.

We eventually got onto the ice fitted with our crampons and Alpine sticks and slowly started our ascent. The sensation of walking on a massive block of ice is one, which is hard to describe although as I'm sure you can all imagine Chris was in his element! Our tour guide basically told us to walk flat footed, toes pointing out with 'duck feet' which came very naturally to Chris who walks like Pingu at the best of times!

The first part of the tour is where the half day hikers manage to get to before they have to turn around and go back, in this part there are ice steps roughly cut into the ice face and this makes it slightly easier to hike, however as we were on the full day we immediately strayed away from this path and started heading up a vertical ice face cutting an entire new path.

The aim of the day was for us to discover a new part of the glacier that hasn't been seen yet and that is exactly what we did. We climbed through holes, walked across thin ice edges, up massive ice hills and basically explored as much as we could. It was quite hard work as the guides had to keep cutting us a safe route through the glacier and ensure that we all stuck together at all times! The health and safety police in the UK would have a field day with this kind of fun! All in all it was one of the most unique, exhausting, amazing experiences. The ice was so beautifully blue and clear and cold it really did look like we were on a film set!

After about 6 hours hiking we started our way back down and were lucky enough to have a natural glacier mud face mask…apparently this stuff sells for big NZ bucks in beauty salons!

Back at base we treated ourselves to a massive pizza at a little café, which we wolfed down and then, started our drive to Hokitika.

Today I can summarise pretty easily…rain…rain…and more rain. It has not stopped raining for the last 9 hours and I'm afraid to say that it gets worse. The campervan has sprung a leak aaaghh! We now have a drip pan collecting rain water on the back shelf. We still carried on our journey and we have managed to make it all the way up to Nelson ready for our ferry in 2 days time which was good and we even managed to get soaked running out of the van to see the Pancake Rocks.

One hell of a wet day…goodnight everyone xxx