A great night of peace spent in Chateaux Franz, the motel side! Bliss!

After we had dinner we headed to Okarito which incidentally is where they return the kiwis to and saw our first road sign for kiwi! Sweet! We headed out to watch the sunset as you get a panoramic view of the southern alps and the sunset! Made it just in time and was beautiful.

This morning, we woke up to bright sunshine!! Woohoo!!! Headed back to Fox as were booked on the 8.35 half day hike. When we got there, two people were late for the 8.30 heli-hike and we managed to squeeze on instead!! (Although these people later turned up! Oops) so, back to the original plan. We were bused out to the airfield, given boots and socks, then weighed (?!) with our backpacks and put into two groups to be flown up to the glacier. You go pretty far up the glacier, probably higher than the day walk, depending on the group I guess. It was pretty amazing, blue in colour for most of it, due to compressed pockets of air absorbing all the other colours bar blue. We landed on the glacier then attached crampons and away we hiked! Lots of cravasses and pools and holes made it interesting walking. The photo is taken in a glacial cave that was gorgeous. We made some friends from Bermuda/USA and walked for about three hours on the ice. The weather began to close in and luckily we were back near the self made heli-pad ready to head back down. You had to crouch on the ice and shelter your face from the flying ice! We came back down through cloud and rain... Knew it couldn't last for long again...

Had a lovely lunch in the Fox Glacier guiding hobnail cafe before getting back in Lucy for our journey to Wanaka. (In the rain!) There were many beautiful waterfalls and blue pools but we were soaked after the first visit to Thunder Creek falls so our enthusiasm wained a little and we ran out to the rest, quick photo and back to the car! The SH6 drives along the Haast pass, the lowest of the passes at a mere 508m. It meets the tip of lake Wanaka before crossing over the neck of land to meet Lake Hawea and following it down for about 50km before cutting back to the end of Lake Wanaka. We are staying in a lovely YHA and had steak and cheese pie in Wanaka Ale House with crushed pear cider and a Oyster Bay merlot topped off by the clearing clouds and a colourful sun down.

Found a Brady Creek today, had it nit been raining we would have stopped to take a photo!! And Clarkey, nice job on scoring at the weekend!!