I have to admit I was feeling a little peaky as I rose and got ready for the bus. The three hours sleep had done little to help and I decided to sit at the front of the bus to try to hold things together. The first hour of the journey was a study in watching the horizon and distracting my mind but I managed to overcome the winding roads without incident. As we headed up over the Haast pass in a snowstorm, however, the bus started to struggle even more than I, and we soon had to stop to put on snow chains. The driver hopped out, spent ten minutes looking at the chains, and made it very obvious he didn’t have a clue as to what to do with them. All four of us passengers hopped off and after some due consideration, man style, we began to work out how they went on. Twenty minutes later they seemed to be well enough attached and miraculously my hangover had disappeared, the mountain air and freezing conditions combining better than any bacon sandwich.

A few hours later, after a stunning drive through the spectacular mountains and the lower West Coast I was dropped at my hostel in Fox Glacier township, a collection of about 15 buildings close to the foot of the glacier. I had a wander into ‘town’ and picked up some things to make a sandwich for the next day’s glacier trek. I got back, had dinner, and spent the evening in the cinema room, alternating between updating my blog and watching first ‘Iris’(very moving story of an author with Alzheimer’s starring Judi Dench) then the rather lower brow ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary‘. Thankfully the quilt was thick enough on my bed to warm me up as the night was a freezing cold one.