Thursday, April 14, 2011

Fox and Franz-Josef Glaciers, comments

HI again!
Now the text:
We drove to Hokitika, a little town in our way that, at least, had a fuel station and a library with internet. A part from a stunning beach full of timber brought by the strong currents of the Alps rivers.

Here in the Southern Island, especially in the west coast, its difficult to find 'normal' towns at all. You find signs of the type :next fuel station in 90 km.

After sleeping in a DOC (Department of Conservation) camping ground in a lake (4 free). We were still tired from Arthur's Pass track, so we spent a couple of hours watching a movie : "Oceans". Really cool images, amazing that nowadays technology allow cameras to record videos under deep water, at night with just the moonlight. A movie to see if you still haven't, it's similar to "Earth".

After that we drove to Franz Josef, a little village next to a huge Glacier which has as special, that can be seen at so low altitudes as 250 m.

We walked up and had a look at it, later slept in another Camping with Spa (mmm, que Bo). We met a couple from Spain who still 'beat' us, they are travelling for a year!

Next day, more glacier! We drove to Fox, and decided that just looking at it from the bottom is not enough, so we took a helicopter that brought us right on top of it, about in the middle of its lenght. Really deep blue ice formed up there, also an unforgettable experience to walk with crampons overy 100m of ice. We even found a little under-ice passage, indescribable! I would upload the video, but in Ne Zealand is stupidly difficult to find a fast WLAN with a lot of allowed traffic.

In Fox, we walked around the lake Matheson, famous for its reflexions of mount Cook (highest mountain with 3.754 m), but the weather didn't gave us the opportunity. Around the Lake Daniela saw this impossibly blue fungi. Colors are not photoshoped! Natural blue!

We slept in Gillespies beach campground, incredible the amount of wood on this coasts. Really nice one, full of interesting stones.

The rivers are here sometimes light blue (turquoise) or kind of white/grey, because of the Alps melting snow. Look really strange and they remember me those of Switzerland and the German Alps.

Cheers ! Until next post!

JM & Daniela.
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