Ice Ice Baby!

Wow! Today I got to fly in a helicopter flown by a mad Scotsman up to a glacier that moves up to 5 metres a day! Franz Josef is pretty unique in that it’s a glacier that descends into a rainforest, which is great for the temperate explorer like myself! Mmm, warm weather!

Suz and I jumped on board the heli hike at the town itself and then our pilot Jamie, took us right up the glacier, swooping from side to side and banking steeply to show us the various parts like the top, a huge cascade and a plateau of crevasses.

Once we’d giggled our way up midway of the glacier, we were dropped off onto the ice to await the second party before we went for a bit of a hike around. For some reason all of us there had forgotten that ice can be really slippy, either that or there is something different about glacial ice, ‘cause we all had real problems staying upright! Fortunately we had all come equipped with crampons, so our guide Thai showed us how to put these on, which immediately made things totally better, and allowed us to tromp around with no problems! And what a view!We’d been dropped onto a plateau with a cascade not to far from us, so we were able to look up the glacier and see some great shapes being carved out by the cracking and tumbling glacier, and the colours were all shades of blue and white!

Once the second group had joined us, we set off on a really gentle hike about the plateau, until we came to a compression cave, formed when two differently moving parts of the glacier collide in slow motion and lift to form a cave underneath. Inside the ice is that really glacial blue, almost like a darklight. We’d made friends with a Danish lady called Stine (as in the latter part of Christine), who decided to see if licking a glacier would get your tongue stuck…

Apparently it tasted of water. Who’d have thought! This is Suz inside the cave…

Weird light, but it was beautiful. We kept listening out for a large thunder-crack to see if a large section of ice would calve off the top of the ice fall and crash down the base of the fall, but although we heard some ominous cracks, nothing large fell, most disappointing as we were bathed in bright sunshine on the glacier. I was really enjoying the crampons and jumping about being an arse whenever I could, for instance…

More Edmund Blackadder than Edmund Hillary :)

The sun melts the surface of the glacier each day, and by night re-freezes most of it, so you get all sorts of weird lakes, run-offs and sculpted landscapes up there, it has to be seen to be believed, it was wonderful

But along with all the larking about, our guide was there to stop us from falling into crevasses which can open up, we stepped across some that were more than 40 metres deep!

We must have been up there for a good 2 hours or so, it was brilliant as it wasn’t a ‘drop off, have a quick five minutes and then back down again’, you really got to play around on the glacier itself and have a good explore before the helicopter came to pick us up again.

The pilot was brilliant, and made the flying just as much apart as the hiking, excellent stuff! So we rounded up the experience with a coffee with Stine who was going the way that we’ve just been.

Next – onwards towards Queenstown and Te Anau!