The Ice Age Cometh

Further down the West coast and it's time to rejoin the tourist trail. First of all it's the Glaciers. There's two Glaciers of distinction in NZ, Franz Joseph and Fox, and a hundred or so other ones that apparently aren't worthy of the coach loads of tourists the other two get. Or, it could be the fact you have to climb to the other ones that mean most people, ourselves included, are happily contented with the main attractions.

Either way we arrive the night before in the town of Franz Joseph where we encounter a sign that will become very familiar to us everywhere we go: NO CAMPING! Unable to find a suitable place to sleep, we instead choose a wholey unsuitable place which is on the shore of the glaciers melt water. A raging torrent of cloudy, nutrient-rich, icey water, we decide the odds of a huge ice chunk falling off the glacier up river and causing a big sploosh that would envelope us, to be in our favour and pitch camp. We survive the evening and decide in retrospect that it probably wasn't our wisest decision of the trip so far. That morning it's up and out on foot as we walk up to the glacier where we get a chance after standing back in respect, to gingerly approach it and touch it, keeping half an eye on the ice shelves above us and the car sized boulders resting on top of them. Had we only come a day later we might just have caught sight of the two fools who ventured inside the glacier before it fell on them, requiring emergency assistance and ridicule, the national broadsheet referring to them rather accurately in it's front page headline as "Bloody Idiots". Then glacier number 2, Fox which we couldn't quite get as close to but was still very impressive.