Another lazy morning followed by a half hour drive over mountains to Fox Glacier (insert joke about Fox’s Glacier Mints here). We’ve just booked in for a four hour guided tour over the glacier, which should be fun. Ness is a bit apprehensive about the climbing involved but if we could do the volcanoes we can bloody do a glacier!
We’ve had lunch at a nearby café;, me having fish yet again (it’s so tasty, I’ve had a piscine epiphany). We’re now killing a bit of time in the camper van before the tour starts. I was hoping to find an open wireless internet transceiver knocking about but no luck — oh well.
Wow. Well we spent the afternoon up a glacier all right — 4 hours of fairly hard walking and climbing. Glaciers are cool (no pun intended) — I really enjoyed the whole experience of clambering over a huge mass of ice, crampons and all! Some amazing views from the glacier of the huge valley it’s carved out over the past millenia, and some fantastic wind- and water-sculpted ice structures.
At one point we passed through a very slender ice crevass — was only just wide enough for us to get through — pretty wet and cold but a fun experience!
We’ve now driven a couple of hours south on the west coast down to Haast where we’re camping for the night. It’s about 5-6 hours to Queenstown tomorrow where our more extreme experiences start — white water rafting for a start!
Matt Godbolt is a C++ developer living in Chicago. He works for Hudson River Trading on super fun but secret things. He is one half of the Two's Complement podcast. Follow him on Mastodon or Bluesky.