The explorer with the Franz Josef glacier as backdrop. Not easy to see, I know
Leaving Wanaka we went west towards the sea driving through cold rain forests. Well that might not be the correct name but since it's on the hill side leading down to the coast it rains a lot and since most of us imagine a rain forest as something warm I just want to tell that this is very lush and dense vegetation without being hot and steaming. Along the way there were plenty of waterfalls and we followed a beautiful river for a fair bit.
The mid west side of the south island is a quite remote area and not many people live here. Only a few farms along the road and almost no towns at all. The main attraction here are the glaciers especially Fox and Franz Josef. The unique thing with these two is that they end up only a couple of km's from the coast and only on a few hundred meters of height so they are very accessible. Or maybe I should say they were. The sad thing now is that only in the last 3-5 years the mouth of both these glaciers have moved several hundred meters upstream probably due to global warming.
This means you can no longer enter any of them by foot, you need a helicopter. So that's what people do. "it's sad they're melting but put me in a fucking petrol stinking helicopter so I can see them before they're totally gone" hmmm
Until now we had been very lucky with the weather but this day it was raining cats and dogs. Hmm wonder if anyone outside Sweden has ever heard that expression. It was in the English schoolbook when I was a kid and all Swedes in my generation know this proverb but I've never heard any native English speaker use it. If any natives reading this please leave a comment!
The first glacier if you come from north is Fox. After a few kilometers on a small road though the forest we find the parking. It was now raining really heavily so we decided it's not a good idea to do the walk so we decided to continue to Franz Josef hoping for the rain to stop and at least check in to our hotel first. So we did and speaking to the motel owner we realised there was really not anything else to do than the glacier so we decided to defy the rain and go there anyway.
I was quite pissed off about the weather when we got there because it destroyed something I've really been looking forward to but things took an unexpected twist.
What an experience it was! Yes we got wet as drenched rats but what a scenery. We walked up a valley, actually the river that constitutes the end of the glacier and there was literally water pouring down everywhere along the hillsides. Hundreds of waterfalls and almost no other people around. It was so beautiful and we felt so small, one of my biggest nature experiences ever! It took us 45 mins to reach the glacier or rather the end of the walk. You're not allowed to go further and actually it's really not possible if you don't want to risk your life. As said a couple of years ago the ice would now have been at our feet but now it was maybe 300m away and because of the rain we didn't see much of it, only the contours. In the end that didn't matter that much, the nature experience was great anyway.
This was new years eve and on the way back we totally soaked found a chinese take away where we bought or new years dinner and had it in the motel room :)
Cheers
Waterfalls everywhere
Beautiful
The path to the Franz Josef
The west coast main road
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