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. Follow him on Mastodon or Bluesky.