Westwood Lodge- A Select Hotel South Island

Day 79 - Caught a nice sunset and looked at glow worms last night, and this morning took a trip to a couple of museums / centres in Hokitika and wandered around the beach. The Kiwi museum was interesting (saw four kiwi's running around) as was the historical museum (though of course the film i wanted tio see was out of order!). Didn't have long to spend anyway as i had to get my **** to Franz ...

... glacier lakes from the carpark, 800 steep steps, a 12 rung ladder, 30 meter cliff hike and an unknown amount of kilometers, we made it onto the ice, and boy was it ever worth the effort!

Once on the glacier, we stopped to put crampons on and begun to hike around the glacier with our tour guide providing us some awesome trivia about their formations and the Maori legends surrounding it. And before you know it, it was time to hike back...unfortunately...through the ...

... i then walked up sentile rock for views from up high and then walked to peters pool and along davison track as this was sheltered from the rain by the trees and was through nice fern forests, i continued on to wombat lake and then retraced my steps to the car park, arriving back in the village about 2pm to defrost and then go for a nice lunch in the pub opposite the hostel, yes they even had a pub in the place so small the total population excluding tourists is 400. 

... glacier and strapped on our crampons (Charlie you would be proud of us ;-)) although I did put mine on the wrong feet to start with I spotted my own error. We then split into two groups and headed up the glacier with the guide clearing steps with an Axe in front is us. Some parts were pretty steep and they had ropes to help you along. We spent two hours on the ice and managed to climb up only a very small portion of the glacier but the views ...

There are two glaciers on the west coast that reach very low to sea level. One is the Franz Joseph and the other is Fox. We decided to forgo the Franz Joseph and headed to Fox where we were able to see it but it was too late to hike onto the glaciers.

For me, a glacier is a glacier and I have seen plenty back in the US.

... icey stuff sure is cold!! Grin

We hike thru the Tasman Valley and see a Blue Lake and also some beautiful glaciers floating in another lake…of course I make Glen hike overland to get closer so I can take better pictures so a 15 min hike turned into 2 hours but it was fun and adventourous and the glaciers were cool to see. Cheeks glowing a ton of photos and pretty damp from the drizzle…still not having seen Mt Cook we headed on further south to Queenstown.

The train through the mountains was pretty nice. On the Christchurch side the weather was nice and we went over several gorges with green water down in the river below and we saw several snow-capped mountains. I was, however, surprised at the lack of snow! I expected that since it is winter and those are mountains, that there would be snow all over the place! But that logic has not held true. It seems that the ...

... where we could see out to sea and there were lots of jagged rocks. It was pretty and there was a nice dog there who reminded me of Ruddles. From here we continued past the cliffs, stopping only to look at some strange piles of rocks. We reached the Fox Glacier at 3pm. We walked down the path to have a look at it. Due to rock falls we couldn't get very close, but we got a good view of the ice tumbling down the valley. It was smaller than we had ...

... Josef glacier. We arrived in the early morning to get kitted out in waterproofs, warm hats and crampons which we carried in large bum bags (very fetching!) The glacier was a 15 minute drive from the town centre. I have to admit i was a little disappointed by the size of it at first, that was until our guide pointed out that the tiny specks about half way up were people! From then on we were all in complete ore of its magnitude. It was a 45 minute ...