The Franz Josef Glacier in the Southern Alps of New Zealand, was named after an Austrian Emperor after being first discovered (well by a European, the Maori's knew of it before) by an Austrian called Haast. In the last ice age it (and others) stretched to the Tasman Sea and carved out the Fiordlands of the South Island. Today we hiked onto the glacier, a pretty scary thought when you see the picture of the steep ice steps which you have to climb up to get onto it!

We booked ourselves onto the full day trek, which gives you about five or six hours on the ice, as the other trips only give you a short time on the ice, which we were told was not enough as you don't get to the ice caves and pinnacles. After about an hour though we could barely feel our feet, so the two hour trip seemed not such a bad option.

The glacier is different to the Perito Moreno that we saw in Argentina, as the Perito Moreno has spectacular ice eruptions as the ice at the front of the glacier drops away into the lake below. The Franz Josef melts as it travels down the valley and escapes as water through a huge ice cave on the face, as well as smaller ice eruptions, but to look at it is nowhere near as spectacular as the Perito Moreno. The ice is also dirty (probably due to hundreds of people hiking on it every day), so nowhere near is picture-perfect.

After putting on our ice talons we climbed the face of the glacier, up a steep ice staircase carved out by our guides with axes. There's a rope to hang on to to help drag yourself up there, but it's still a pretty scary introduction to glacier trekking. Once up there we had a few more steep and narrow staircases to master, but after a while you really got the hang of it, and soon (apart from the numb feet) you forget you're walking on a glacier.

It takes five years for ice to move from the top of the glacier to the bottom of the valley, which by glacier standards is extremely fast, so every day the guides are up on the glacier making staircases and removing ice which could cause accidents. The glacier is 10km's long, and the top is around 2000 metres above sea level, travelling all the way down the valley to about 200 metres above sea level. The glacier expands and retracts depending on the rate of melt and snowfall.

Unfortunately again the weather was awful, though luckily we avoided the rain that was forecast, and after a few hours of trekking and reaching the caves and pinnacles, we had to turn back. A bit of a shame as we had only just regained the feeling in our feet, but still after a while the ice all starts to look the same, and it even took our guide a while to find our way out. We also encountered some kea up on the glacier, which are New Zealand parrots which attack windscreen wipers and aerials on your cars, but are quite cute still.

Leaving the glacier was easier than we expected, as after a few hours we had got quite comfortable on the ice (well until Allison slipped up a couple of times landing on her bum with a thud), as we had to climb down the steep ice staircase forwards, but luckily we all climbed down together so if one of us went we all went together. A great but exhausting experience.