Heading for Glacier country on the west coast of NZ, we meet our first day of rain and did it rain - It was relentless for the whole trip, obliterating the obviously stunning scenery but as they say "every cloud has a silver lining" and in this case the rivers and waterfalls which were filling fast looked the most spectacular we had seen.

We stayed at Fox Glacier (named after the mint perhaps) and took a hiking trip onto the glacier (the helicopter trip was too expensive). The terminal face itself was disappointing being far less clean and spectacular than our Norway experience. The walk on the glacier itself was exciting however traversing across the ice avoiding crevasses and walking through deep ice passages wearing crampons - We regretted not doing the walk in Norway (sorry Adam).

The Franz Joseph glacier was nearby but could not be accessed on foot because the terminal face had receded swiftly and left the approach unstable and dangerous so gave it a miss.

The local bar was good and unusually stayed open late playing good music and it was with some difficulty and a borrowed wheelbarrow that we left in the early hours.

The next place on our route was Greymouth, a conveniently positioned town before we crossed back to the east coast. It was also about 30 kms south of "The Pancake Rocks" a unique geological formation of rocks that visibly looks like a stack of pancakes and surrounded by "blowholes" that shoot the sea water several feet into the air at high tide - having had enough excitement from this bit of grandstanding from the natural world we returned to Greymouth. It was a national holiday in NZ, a lively night we thought, the first bar was a brewery bar no customer only a barman and all the signage, umbrellas and beer pumps were plastered with the brewery logo "Speights" - Heather asked the barman if they had any "Monteith's" - "No" was the cold reply. We moved on to find where the action was but after walking the entire town and finding it was the only bar open, we gave up and went home.