Saturday was a driving day, getting up from Wanaka to the township of the Fox glacier. The night before we'd tried to go to the cinema (I've still not seen Harry Potter!) but we'd missed the last showing- it's supposed to be an awesome cinema with sofas and cars instead of usual seats. We spent the morning mooching around Wanaka and once again spent too much time and money in the supermarket. The journey up was quite good, stopping at a couple of places on the way. Our first stop was a short walk through a forest and onto a beach. It was a perfect spot, sand and sea on one side and if you turned around, a mountain range. At Fox we pulled up in a holiday park and went to the pub, there waa hardly anyone about, I'm finding that not much happens in these little villages.
We woke up in the warm, thanks to our heater, and got up fairly early to set off on our Glacier day. It took us 3 attempts to figure out where to park to get to Fox glacier but we eventually got out and began the 45 minute walk to the lookout. We had been told that there was a stream crossing and naively thought that the little streams you could step over were the extent of this. At the actual stream, it was 3 metres wide with fairly deep water and we had to navigate our way across the rocks in order to stay dry. Grace went first and after stepping onto the first rock fell straight in. Looking back, it was hilarious, but at the time she was soaked and unable to get up. Charlie helped her out as when I moved, I fell over and smashed my camera on a rock as I went. I can still take pictures, just don't know what of! We headed back to the van so that Grace could get changed and then had a second attempt. This time was more successful, we all got to the other side dry and continued our walk. Ten minutes later we were faced with a second stream, this one was wider and posed a bigger problem. Charlie was quite good at getting across and was on the other side while me and Grace were still surveying it. I decided not to risk falling in so took my shoes off and ran through it. This walk was proving to be more challenging than first anticipated so we were hoping that this view was going to be awesome. However, when we got there it was a disappointment. Basically, it looked like a bit of ice in a quarry. I was expecting a mass of ice, filling the space, sparkling white; what we got was a bit of ice in the distance with a brown, muddy background. The mountains behind it looked pretty cool though. We then had to traipse back over the two streams to get back in the van. Our next stop of the day was to Lake Matheson where we got some cool pictures of moutains reflected in the water. We treated ourselves to lunch at the cafe and then it was onwards to the Franz Josef glacier. We decided to just do a short walk here as the previous had been so hazardous. This viewpoint was just as disappointing as the other. The glacier looked a little better by being slightly bigger, but still generally not worth all the fuss it gets. Although, I'm sure a hike on the glacier would be a cool experience and it might look better.
We arrived into Greymouth at night and parked up in a hostel car park. We took full advantage of the common area there and ended up watching TV by the fire all night, made a nice change to our cold campervan!