Fox Glacier Campervan Park

Sweet day in Wanaka. We managed an aesome breakfast at a place called Kai Whaka Pai in the centre of town, truly awesome!

We
managed to get photo's with a complete line of backpacker campers from
around NZ at the lakefront, this included Wicked, Escape, Explore More,
Jucy and Spaceships

We booked ourselves in for a helicopter
flight up to Mt Roy for the afternoon and decided to check out Amazing
world whilst killing time before our helicoppter flight. Amazing worl...

Our early bus to the airport for our flight to Queenstown was shared with Danni, a young woman who was travelling to have a kidney operation. We chatted and counted our blessings. On arrival at Queenstown airport, our tight schedule did not allow us time to travel into the town itself unfortunately. Instead, we picked up our second hire car of the trip, (this time a Holden Barina, which is a new one to me), and headed off towards the West coast. We took the road over the Crown Range, stopped ...

What a fantastic day this turned out to be. We took a full day guided glacier hike, (the 'Nimble Fox Walk' as it has been newly branded), with our very chatty and knowledgable guides Rebecca and Cornelia. The skies were blue for most of the day, but of course, being West coast, we had to have a little bit of rain for the full experience, and to help maintain the 200 days rain a year statistic. Rebecca told us that the glacier has actually been advancing at approximately one metre per day for ...

We have had a very adventurous few days! Queenstown is quite the place for spending loads of money on stupid things. Our second day there, we went on a jet boat ride for an hour. It went very fast and could go over very shallow water (10cm!) and the bloke did loads of 360 spins. It wasn't very good on the choppy lake though. In that afternoon, after a game of mini golf (more about that later) Ed went on the Shotover Canyon Swing. You are all harnessed in, and then have to jump off a platform ...

After much fun on 90 Mile Beach we headed down the west coast of the Northland which is called the Kauri Coast. This is where there are the only remaining Kauri forests in New Zealand. The Kauri tree is the second largest tree in the world, second only to the Californian Sequoia. When the Eurpoean settlers came to New Zealand with their superior technology this made logging the large trees feasible and highly profitable. The majority of the Kauri forests were destroyed leaving only a few ream...

On Wednesday we had a slightly lazy morning, but once we got going it was a fabulous day. The weather was absolutely glorious sunshine so we set off immediately for the Fox Glacier. We drove as close as we could get and walked up to the lookout point and had our first glimpses of the glacier. It was beautiful but big and scary at the same time. It literally had massive boulders all along the terminal face where it had basically ripped pieces of the mountainside. The river running out from be...

The abundance of snow made the famous drive from Wanaka through the Haast Pass to the West Coast a winter wonderland. The alpine scenery was truly breathtaking as countless waterfalls cascaded through thick forest canopy into icy cold streams flowing hundreds of metres below. Stopping to help two young German lads stuck in the snow, we ourselves succombed to the same fate but our expert ability in fitting snow chains meant our escape was simply "too easy"! We were back on our merry way within...

Our travels in New Zealand have got off to a fine start, in more ways than we intended. We went to pick up our campervan early on Monday morning and, to our initial disappointment, hadn't been allocated the Batmobile which we'd hoped for. However, when we finally saw what was to be our home for the next 17 nights, we were more than happy. Our camper has been decorated with characters from 80's cult film Labyrinth, starring David Bowie. Or so that's what everyone has been telling me - I've nev...