After the underwater adventure, we headed on down the coast to Hokitika. We stopped at Punekiki to see the blowholes and pancake rocks but sadly the sun had gone down so all we saw was a few possums in the moonlight. We could hear the amazing booming of the blowholes but couldn’t see the spray that sometimes goes several hundred feet in the air – something for next time we’re down here.

The hotel at Hokitika was nothing too special, but we were there less than 12 hours and it served it’s purpose well. We had a surreal dinner at the hotel restaurant where the waitress/hostess was remarkably unenthusiastic about her job. When we first arrived at 8:30 for dinner she had to “check with the cook” to make sure they could still serve us dinner as they closed at 9. Then when we were seated and started looking at the menu, Mandy asked what the soup du jour was, only to be told to wait until she went through the specials – which she then proceeded to do right then. Other oddities included deferring our request for water to the “waitress” whom we had not seen up to that point. I guess this is the downside to not tipping at restaurants!

So anyway, we left Hokitika at 7am to drive to the Franz Josef glacier for our 8:45am check-in. It was a remarkably cloud-free morning for the west coast of the south island, so our hopes were high that the flight wouldn’t be cancelled. We arrived a few minutes late to check in after driving through some of the most beautiful valleys and pastoral scenes of sheep grazing beneath enormous mountains besides the ocean.

After getting the all clear, we went to put on our stinky glacier hiking boots (which we had to use so that the “talons” would fit on the soles). There were about 20 or so people there and they asked us to split into two groups… one that felt a bit more adventurous and up for some moderate hiking, and the other for people who wanted to go slow. Greg, mandy and I and 2 other people self-selected as moderately fit, the rest stood in a slightly confused mass until the guides forced 5 others onto our side… an indicator of the speed of walking that we’d do! The helicopter took 5 of us at a time and we were in the first group. It was the first time in a helicopter for all of us, so we got a lot of thrills out of the ride. The pilot took us up and over the top of the entire glacier and then did a few passes over the different sections of the glacier. They said the snow in the fastest part of the glacier moves about 3 metres a day (that’s 10 feet), and the end of the glacier is currently advancing at about 2 feet a day after several years of receding.
We landed in the middle of a flat section of the glacier that doesn’t move much and got out to put on our talons (which are sort of lightweight crampons). Once the second half of our group arrived, our guide Troy led us off across the glacier. Troy cut steps in various parts of the glacier with a big pickaxe he carried around, while we just had little ice axes to help us balance and hoist ourselves around various places.
We hiked around for about 2 hours making a big loop around the glacial flats. We went through some crevasses and even an undiscovered ice cave that mandy was the first non-guide to go through ever! We encountered crevasses and dangers that included icy potholes that went down several feet and were full of freezing water. We all managed to avoid them but a few in our party went in up their knee and one poor woman fell into one all the way up to her waist… she was very brave about it. In the end we had a very fun walk around amazing ice pillars and deep blue ice caves (the compressed ice only reflects the higher frequency lightwaves which gives the ice an unreal blue tinge).
On our helicopter flight back down the glacier, the pilot asked us if we wanted to have a little fun, or get “the granny tour”. Of course we wanted to have some fun, so he swooped around the mountains beside the glacier, and took us in low over the river before making a stomach churning turn and coming in for a perfect landing.
After some lunch at the base, we drove down to Queenstown for our final two days. The drive took us about 4 and a half hours through some beautiful snowcapped mountains and we finally arrived at the Queenstown House at about 5:30, with plenty of time to spare for wine and cheese!