Franz Josef Glacier

Today me and Izzy took a half-day trip to Franz Josef Glacier. SImilar to Fox Glacier, you can walk free of charge up to the bottom of the ice, however to get onto the ice you need to be on a guided tour. It was $123, but also included entrance to the Glacier Hot Pools which are some mineral hot pools just down the road from the glacier.

We arrived at the tour guide centre at about 8.15am to be kitted out with our boots, waterproofs and crampons, and by half eight were crammed onto a bus to head to the glacier. For the half-day trip we got to spend about an hour and a half on the ice - a lot of time is taken up by walking to the ice from the car park. Even though the glacier looks only a ten minute walk away, it is actually a good 2kms over rocks and takes around 45 minutes, but the 2000ft mountains behind it make it look like it's a lot closer than it actually is.

As we got close to the ice we stopped to fit the crampons to our boots. Every morning tour guides go onto the ice to cut out steps for the day's tours, and these routes change daily as the ice is constantly moving.

Our guide for the day, Caleb, had to stop every so often to chip away at the ice and help keep the steps formed. The route cut through massive gorges of ice and tunnels made from warm air and water. A lot of the formations of ice were only made in the last week, and will change again within the next week. Standing on the rocks away from the ice, these gorges looked quite small, but on the glacier we soon realised how huge they were, as we walked through them they towered above us.

We arrived back in town around 12:30pm, and as we were collecting our vouchers for the hot pools I noticed Peter's (who we met in Australia) name written on a post it note. Turns out he's in town too, so we met up with him, and we'll probably hang around for another day or so before moving on north to the rest of the west coast.