Down the West Coast to the glaciers

Reefton was quite cool, the sun had been shining all day, and at night there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, so as a consequence the stars were out in force! There is no pollution here, and as it’s at the bottom of the Pacific, it’s about as far away from anywhere as it could be, as I think was Reefton, so the Milky Way was painted brightly across the middle of the night sky, and the Southern Cross was blazing, fantastic!

We got up and had a nice breakfast in the lodge where we were staying, before trundling on down the highway towards Franz Josef and the glacier heli-hike that we are scheduled on for tomorrow. The day was glorious sunshine once again, which bodes well for tomorrow, as the helicopters won’t fly in bad weather.

Had to take snap of some of the oddities along the road though, there seems to be a large number of people who keep ageing hulks around on their properties, slowly rusting into oblivion, but this guy was up to something with them…

Some great old examples in that eclectic line up!

Further on down the line you could tell we were getting into glacier country, as there were multiple streams / rivers that we started to cross, each of which had amazingly clear water running down it – unbelievably clear.

We stopped at Lake Ianthe, as again, it was bright sunshine and the lake was sparkling invitingly! I had to go dangle my feet in off the small pier!

It was a little chilly, but lovely!

I’m still stunned by how lovely the scenery here can be, and when I stopped to go panning for gold (yeah right) from the gold bearing quartz rock washed down in the rivers, Suz snapped off this shot up the river to the valley and clouds that went into making it…

Unfortunately I didn’t strike it rich, but I was only ‘panning’ for 5 mins, although this is gold country :(

Just around the corner though, all of these glacial streams met up and created a river of just the most astounding colour…

It really is that blue, I promise you! As you can probably tell though, we now weren’t far away from today's destination – Franz Josef, so the final picture from today is he great cabin in the trees that I was so looking forward too..it’s lovely!