July 22nd (Wednesday) - Day 143 - Franz Josef
Everybody on the bus was hung over! 45 minute free bar and backpackers do not mix. Sarah was amongst the worst of these! But despite this we had to press on. Luckily for everyone it was a relatively short journey. We only had a few stops along the way. The first was at some green stone store; I had no interest in that and didn't even go in the shop. The second of these in a tiny little gold mining town. We had a tour of the gold information centre and to be honest it was really boring. We arrived into Franz Josef at midday and Sarah went straight to bed. Franz Josef is nothing more than a tourist base for the Glacier. Hence there was nothing to do apart from glacier hiking. I had some lunch, went and paid for our hike the following day and then had nothing to do. To fill the time I caught up on my blog and went for a walk around town. I walked the whole length of the town in about 5 minutes. I wandered up to the river and down to the information centre. Sarah finally got up and we went for some dinner and just had a really quiet night in the hostel.

July 23rd (Thursday) - Day 144 - Franz Josef
It did not stop raining all night and this was going to be the defining weather of the day. We walked (ran) over to the hiking centre and got prepared for our glacier hike. There were about 18 of us in total doing a full day hike. They gave us a whole bunch of gear including full water proofs, boots, socks and crampons (spikes for the boots). Once all that gear was on it started to get really hot. I already had 4 layers on my top half (on there advice) and with the coat I boiled. This was not to last! They stuck us on the bus to drive the 10 minutes to the national park car park and from there it is an hours walk to the face of the glacier. It was quite an easy walk but it did not stop raining. We had to cross a number of rivers to get there. Saying that the whole path was the river. It was relatively low but could span 200 metres in full flow. Once we reached the face we had to put our crampons on and split down into 2 smaller groups. I pushed Sarah into opting into the first group of more confident people; which I am glad we did. It took a while to get used to the crampons. You are a few centre meters off the floor unless they dig into the ice. As we were still on the rock before the ice, you had to concentrate to stay standing up. The face was mainly covered in stone and rocks. The glacier picks up a lot of debris on the way down and by the end most of the ice has melted and the debris is left on top until it eventually falls down. We witnessed a number of rocks falling in the few minutes we were there. The first part of the hike was the worst. The face is almost a wall so we had to climb it to get to the fresh ice further back. The firm had cut a hundreds of steps into the ice but had to go reshape them every morning as they would melt and move with the flow of the glacier. It was a hard 30 minute climb but we made it in one piece. At this point we got given ice axes to use as walking sticks if needed. We then had the rest of the day to climb as high as we could while exploring. By this time the water proofs were pointless, the rain had soaked through and already we were all starting to feel cold. One person was so cold (and already feeling ill) that she opted to walk back down. The rest of us pushed on and did some exploring. There was so much to see. The main features were the crevasses. Tiny cracks that over time have become 30 metres deep and wide enough to just about walk through, even if it was a tight squeeze in places. We didn't take many photos as everything was soaked through including the camera. After hours of hiking upwards we stopped for lunch. The crew were getting worried about us being cold so pulled out a cover for us to rest under for a bit. It went over all our heads and we sat on the bottom of it to keep the wind and rain out. It did warm up but everything was so damp; including our lunch. After a short stop we pressed on and out of no where it started to thunder and hail. We reached as far as the guides were going to take us. This was the defining moment for me. A huge crevasse that was really blue from the ice. and started to climb back down. To save time they took us down some very steep places. It only took about an hour to get back down and then another hours walk to the car park. By the time we sat on the bus a fire mans hose could not have got us wetter. We had to wait about 15 minutes for the second group to catch up and they took us back into town. Back in the hostel we had to ring out all our clothes (and back packs) and put them in the drier. It was such an amazing experience. That evening we could not be bothered to cook so went for a 'back packer meal' next door. It was cheap so we thought why not. We were so disappointed when the food came out. I would feed a mouse more than what we got! It took us less than a minute to eat it so still hungry we went somewhere else and had a second meal!