We arrived at Franz Josef after a couple of hours on the bus from Lake Mahinapua through stunning scenery and rustled up some grub pretty much straight away, then went to watch the All Blacks vs. Ireland rugby match on the tv in the hostel's bar (they thrashed the Irish much to the annoyance of the two Irish girls on the trip!), and got our results from the fancy dress party. Unfortunately, I didn't win (not that I expected to) but a guy who dressed up as a Maori chief won, which was actually an excellent costume and he really got into character as well. We also got some pretty bad news, and that was that we wouldn't be able to do the full day glacier hike the next day, which we had all bar three of us been planning to do. The glacier would be closed due to unexpected circumstances, which was that sadly one of the guys on the Kiwi bus a day ahead of us didn't disclose a medical condition to the guide and actually had a heart attack up on the glacier and died. The glacier was closed because the local Maori tribe wanted to bless the glacier again so that bad things would not happen again. This being the case, we decided to stay longer in Franz Josef and do the hike the day after.

Since we were no longer doing the glacier hike, on the Sunday morning a group of us woke up at 6am to watch England's first match of the world cup, which was actually a really good match (despite the disappointment of drawing with the Americans). Afterwards I went back to bed for another four or so hours, and it was so nice not to have to wake up to an alarm clock for the first time in over a month! Later on that day a lovely Scottish couple who I have made friends with who are also on their gap years and I went to the glacier hot pools for an hour, which was soooooo relaxing. There were 3 different temperature pools and afterwards I was so sleepy I didn't want to do anything! I also spoke to my brother in Canada on skype for a couple of hours which was really good, nice to have a catch up and organise some things from my Canada trip after I leave New Zealand.

We wore up relatively early on Monday morning and made our way to the glacier hikes shop, where they issued us with various pieces of equipment such as waterproof trousers and crampons, then got in the bus up to the glacier. The first hour was hiking through some rainforest then across the valley floor up to the glacier terminal. It is actually a really cool glacier because I believe it is one of the few in the world that goes down into a glacier. It is really interesting to see how two such different landscapes come together. When we got close enough up to the ice we put on our crampons and headed up onto the ice. We followed our guide (we had a nice small group of 11) down the paths he had made for us. In various places he had to make steps in the ice with his ice axe to make it safer for us, and we went through loads of cool features such as crevasses, ice caves and up small ice cliffs. It was pretty cold up there, but the awesome mountains around and the gorgeous views down the valley and the deep blue colour of the ice made it well worth being up there. It was an amazing day, and felt really surreal and other-wordly being right up close and personal in the ice.

When we got down off the ice at about 5pm we had to pretty much get straight into our Kiwi Experience bus and do the 6 hour journey down to Wanaka so that we were still on schedule. It was very tiring and a pretty scary journey as we had to go over a Southern Alps pass and the road was very icy so it was pretty slow going. By the time we got to Wanaka all we wanted to do was to get into bed and sleep. It was a pretty exhausting day and it was a shame that we didn't get to see the scenery on the way down to Wanaka as it is meant to be a really beautiful drive, but it was worth it to get our day on the ice. We may not have seen the mountains on the way down but we certainly saw some absolutely beautiful stars. Because we were in the middle of nowhere there was no light pollution so the sky was absolutely covered as it was a clear night. I even saw the southern cross! And I saw the plough (or the saucepan as I like to call it) but the other way around, in it's mirror image as I am in the Southern Hemisphere! It was so funny.

Anyway, Franz Josef was pretty sweet, I really enjoyed it, very chilled out place. On to Queenstown, the adventure capital of the world!

Joelle

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