We arrived in Franz Josef another sunny day luckily and booked staight onto the trip to walk the glacier. The Franz Josef Glacier is the steepest and fastest moving glacier in the world and the walk ensures amazing views of the terrain. The unusual combination of rain forest and the mighty river of ice in such close proximity is unique to glaciers in this region. We got kitted out with boots and spikes to enable us to walk on the ice and coats trousers etc to keep us warm as it can cold on the glacier. We met the group and set off on the 4.5 hour trek. After a short walk through the lush rainforest of the glacier valley we came to amazing views of the glacier with steep crevasses and soaring pinnacles of crisp blue ice. We hiked up and went in and out of crevasses it was really great got some good photos. We went really high up on the glacier had a really great time the guide was from England and we had a real laugh it was quite challenging in places but we loved every minute!

After the trek we settled on a look out point near the glacier as we were doing a walk the next day. The walk we had wanted to do was closed due to flooding so we decided to do a 5 hour walk up the mountains to see over the top of the glacier this turned out to be extremely hard we made it to the top it was pouring with rain we were laughing on the way back down because it was so dangerous in places and i could see us coming of the edge of the mountain. We were exhausted at the end of the hike but luckily we had tickets for the glacier hot pools booked 3 pools 36 - 40 degrees hot ourside they were heaven! Needless to say we slept well that night!

We were then heading back to Christchurch to try and see the couple that we had met when we first arrived in New Zealand. The drive was great, driving round New Zealnd is awesome its so easy and you see some great stuff. We pass a really tiny town (well just a couple of shops and a pub) the pub had a sign saying Wild Food served so we decided to stop. Turns out they had not written the menu for the new place yet but we looked at the old menu and it was road kill you kill it we grill it and all mad stuff like that! The pub had really unsusual stuff all round and loads of dead animal skins on the floor and tables!

We managed to get back to Christchurch in time and called Tina and Steve to see if they were free, they were and we went over and had a great night. I played with Kade and Joe made himself a new best friend with their 2.5 year old son Dan he loved Joe to bits. Next day I went the pictures with Kade and Tina cooked us another of her fab sunday lunches. Next morning they went to work and we got loaded up and packed the van. A big thanks to them for making us so welcome and their hospitality, we hope to see them again!

We set off heading up the coast to a place Kaikoura as we wanted to go whale watching and this is the place to do it apparently!