Being guided around a glacier by a donkey
Trip Start
Aug 14, 2008
1
6
20
Trip End
Sep 25, 2008
Franz Josef,
New Zealand
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Left Barrytown at 12:30 and found the weather back to beautiful! We stopped at Greymouth for a quick look about and to pick up three Irish guys from the Trans Alpine railway. Our lunch break was at Hokitika - a nice town situated between the Southern Alps and ocean and totally dominated by greenstone stores. The next stop was a 'museum' dedicated to the trade of the region - catching deer to stock deer farms. An extremely eccentric owner came to greet us and show us a video on how they used to catch the deer (by jumping out of helicopters onto the back of the animals and wrestling them to the ground - imagine a documentary of this with TopGuns' Dangerzone theme tune in the background), before letting us view his collection of possums and a very tame wild boar, who sits on demand!
Arrived in Franz Josef and went to the glacier sentre to book our full day hike on the glacier for the following day. The hostel is much bigger than any I've stayed in in New Zealand, and it's quite nice to have more people and action about, as opposed to the secluded locations we've been staying at lately. It's me and the Irish (James, Kieran and Ross) in the dorm tonight.
At 2am, everyone on our floor got woken up by the Kiwi Experience bus load coming back from the bar, making the most rediculous amount of noise - literally screaming on the landing! One couple was even stood outside our room discussing if and / or where they would have sex and another was sick in the shower, which I confirmed when I got up and saw it the next morning! Those secluded hostels appeal once again - thank God I didn't go for the KE tour!
Day 181 - This morning we went to the glacier HQ to get kitted out and meet our guide Dale aka Donkey - who is the first example of what a British expat in Kuta, Bali led me to believe of NZ men; "I think you'll like them.." (having known me 2 minutes) "... they're like the Australians in terms of good looks but also with brains" - I had felt let down following these expectations until now. Sadly, along with him came a Candadian girl who followed him around the glacier on his heels like a puppy dog!
Franz Josef glacier is unique in that it's a low altitude glacier and one of only three in the world that reaches tropical rainforest! Very strange to see lush rainforest meeting a huge body of ice! The walk on the glacier was really good and unbelieveably the weather stayed dry (despite the area witnessing over 200 days of rain a year!) We all wore crampons to walk on the ice and climbed up the glacier, stopping for lunch at our maximum distance, about halfway up the ice and as far as anyone tends to walk in one day from the snout. Compared to the other glacier I hiked on in Austria, Franz Josef is much bigger and and very crevassed. After lunch we spent the afternoon following Donkey through the crevasses and passages to no set route, causing him to pick steps in the ice for us to use, which was pretty cool. We had a lot of fun and a fair few snowball fights and I never fail to feel completely in awe of these enormous structures of ice and their formations - it's all the things I learnt at University that I can now see in real life!
The glacier is a warm glacier, and this means that there is a lot of surface water (of unknown depth). I was the first to put a foot in, up to the knee, which caused the Irish to burst into laughter and an afternoon of stick ensued! Luckily I got out with a dry foot thanks to my waterproof trousers, butthe damage was already done - everytime we reached another puddle the boys all stood the other side with expecting faces, hoping for me to do it again - I was their entertainment! And this was only exacerbated as I went straight away and did it again! This time I wasn't so lucky and the ice cold water permeated through my boot! Poor Dan fell in to a bottomless pool, right up to his chest! I felt I was in no position to complain about my wet foot after that!
During the hike we spent a lot of time waiting while our guide cut steps in the ice, but it was worth it as we got to walk through some really cool crevasses - the final one being so narrow you had to squeeze through sideways and it was touching my back and stomach! We ended up getting back over an hour late, but it was worth it for the experience of a whole day on the glacier, really making the most of it. It was a highlight of the trip for me, seeing all the things I'd read about and studied and just it's shear size and power is something in itself.
In the evening the group met in the bar but only lasted until midnight after our strenuous day! Continued to be bullied by the Irish - apparently I eat a lot!
