Glacier City

Next we headed north of Queenstown and up the west coast to Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers. We stopped briefly at Fox Glacier on our way to our accommodation for the night. As I'd never seen a glacier I had no idea what to expect. In short, it looked like a huge pile of dirty ice. But really huge. At Fox we didn't get on the glacier but we did manage to sneak a peek.





The next day Susanne and I got up really early to go on a full day hike on the Franz Josef. As Michael had already done some glacier hiking on his trip he opted out and stayed back and tried to sort out some plane ticket issues.

Franz Josef is 6 kms high and 1.5 kms across. Our hiking company suited us up with waterproof jackets, pants, hiking boots, wool socks, hats and gloves. All we had to bring was food for lunch and sunscreen - remember, no ozone in NZ.





The hike was pretty cool. The first hour was spent climbing ice stairs - big stairs so it was pretty tiring.





After that we just hiking around on the glacier discovering little paths, climbing ice walls, crossing bridges, etc.









The entire trip was 14 km roundtrip. Writing this the morning after I'm still pretty tired and sore. Now it's time to head back to Christchurch where we grab a flight to Australia at the end of the week to begin the last 2 and a half weeks of our trip.