After another relatively long drive up from milford sound I arrive initially in fox glacier. I stopped off at the free walk to see how much of the glacier was visible without a guide... The answer was not a lot! You could see the edge about 600m in the distance. I was glad I had booked to go on a helicopter tour to see the glaciers instead of just walking. My tour was the following morning. So I still had the afternoon to enjoy so I decided to go for a walk around lake mathison which was known to have views of mount Cook. It was a bit cloudy on the top of the mountain therefore I could only see the bottom but still the walk was very nice and I can say I saw mount Cook because originally I didn't think I was going to have time for this. After my walk I hopped back in the car and drove to my accommodation which was in franz josef (30 mins up the road). I was upgraded for the second time in my travels! Wahoo!! This time I got a room to myself!! How amazing! I slept like a log and even woke up before my alarm the next morning. I drove back to fox glacier as this was where my heli tour set off from. The weather looked ok to start with so off we went in the helicopter. It was my first time in one and I got to sit next to the pilot! It was awesome :-) it doesn't look that hard to fly :-/ Yeh right!! We were about 10 mins into our flight over fox glacier when the weather turned and a storm came over. We had to head back to the landing pad and were given the option of some money refunded or to wait and see if the weather improves this afternoon. I chose to wait and see if the storm passed as the only plans I had for the afternoon was to drive to greymouth further up north but apparently there isn't much there, it's just a stopover between franz and christchurch.
After waiting, unfortunately the weather did not improve so they gave us part of our money back, which was a shame as I was looking forward to see the rest but I was just glad I had seen some of it.