Jen Hillam: Wanaka to the Glaciers

With no place to be this morning it gave us a chance to get a little more rest. We had our Wheatbix and got on our way. Along the way we were able to stop at some really stunning lookout places over the coast. We finally arrived at our first destination, Fox Glacier. After a quick lunch thrown together from whatever we could find at the only general store in the area we headed up to do a tramp up to the glacier (by the way we do “tramps” here instead of “hikes”, it is not a bad term that is just what they call it here). It was about a 1 hour return hike to a lookout platform in front of the glacier. It was pretty spectacular so see just a giant frozen sheet going all the way up the mountain but in reality it really was just kind of a huge frozen hill with some crevices, dirt, and rocks. It is shrinking pretty fast though and they had maps of where it used to be and it is definitely disappearing quick.

Then it was off to the Franz Josef glacier, about an hour further north. We started our tramp down an hour long trail. The trail was fairly windy and even though we sort of felt like we were going in the wrong direction we figured it was just around about way of getting there....well until we came to the road we had driven to get there and then we realized we had been going the wrong way the entire time. So we walked back up the road to the car park and started again, this time in the right direction and took a shorter route because it was starting to get dark. We made it to another lookout spot and took some time to check out the glacier. It was pretty much the same as the other one but maybe a bit bigger.

As it got dark we headed to our hostel because there is never much to do or see in these small towns after dark. When we got there we realized we were missing at least one bag of groceries and my bag from the bungy with my video, bungy rope, and ipod. We have no idea where they went, if we left them someplace or if they were stolen. I called everywhere we had been to no luck. So I was pretty upset as it was a major loss and most off all I wanted my bungy video. But I talked to a rep from the company I did it with and they said they were upload an electronic copy online for me and even throw in the pictures for free because they felt bad that my stuff and had gone missing. So it was wasn’t all bad but I still lost a few valuable things and was pretty upset that day. But there wasn’t much else I could do.

That night we stayed in the “Rainforest retreat” hostel in the town just outside Franz Josef. It was not the most impressive hostel that we had stayed at but to save some money we decided to try and take turns sleeping in the car. So Alyssa and I stayed in the hostel while Josh and Marian stayed in the car in true backpacker fashion.