Franz Joseph

  Franz Joesph Glacier, New Zealand
Thursday, October 27, 2005

Hello all,


Since arriving in the South Island the weather has been great. After Nelson we visited Kaiteriteri a lovely little place just on the southeast edge of Abel Tasman National Park.


The beach here was voted in the top five in the world by the Guardian Newspaper and even a little out of season you can see why!!!








The campsite we stayed on was massive and just across a small road from the beach. It was nearly full of locals as it was Labour Day weekend. Also there was a "Little People of New Zealand" conference going on which was a little (pardon the pun) strange.

The main thing to do here is take a water taxi up the coast to various parts of the national park to walking treks only accessible by boat. The weather started out fine but then we had four seasons in about 2 hours.



This is Split Apple Rock, one of the many natural features......



There is also a resident seal colony in the area.





We only spent one night here and headed to Greymouth. The drive was again amazing and passing through Buller Gorge was saw sights like these.





As we neared Greymouth we stopped off to look at a swing bridge.



Kelly didn't like it much!!!!



Greymouth itself is just a small town situated at the mouth of the river Grey and quite uninspiring but it was just a stop off to our next destination. This is also where we met an English couple called Del and Sophie and who we would seem to be following for the next few days or so.

It's quite funny as you keep bumping into loads of people you meet at various campsites. It seems as everyone is doing a similar route like yourselves.

So it was off to Franz Joseph, which is home to Franz Joseph Glacier. Again some great sights along the way, here are a couple.





We had a great view of the mountains from our campsite.




One of only a handful of glaciers of this type and what makes it special is, you can access the glacier at only 240m above sea level.



It actually descends into a temperate rain forest. Most glaciers end around 2000m so it makes it ideal to climb and walk on, so that's what we did.

It's a 2.5km hike to the base of the glacier, which took about 1 hour.



We walked along a riverbed right up to the face of the glacier.



The guides come out here at about 7.30 every morning and cut steps into it to make a route and various guides keep cutting and maintaining the route throughout the day.

Next day they have to do it all again as the route has melted or broken down.....not much fun!!!

It was a very steep climb up the face and the sound of cracking ice and falling rocks made you feel uneasy, but the group of 13 slowly made headway till you come to the first of two bridges.



It looks worse than it is. The glacier was amazing and we walked through tight crevices and looked down big crevasses. Here are a few pics.







We climbed for about two hours and eventually got really high up.







It was hard work but worth every minute but next day we suffered a little.



Ok so that's is for this update but our next one will be quite soon as we have been in Queenstown (the land of extreme anything) for a few days. We've done some great activities that we'll tell you about and we're heading off for Milford Sound tomorrow.

Bye for now!!!!