Franz Josef Glacier

In Franz Josef we stayed at a cool backpackers place called Chateau Franz, so cool in fact that we ended up staying a few days just to relax (or maybe it was because of the free soup every night).

The town is much larger that Fox and so gets a lot more tourists, but at least it has a lot more life to it. Again we did all the local walks, which as usual were all brilliant, and again we walked up to the terminal face of the glacier itself. This time we basically followed the path of a guided group of tourists as they prepared to actually climb up the glacier with crampons and ice picks (we were having lunch as they started to pass by). Again I was struck by how horrible tour groups are, as the group was huge, maybe 30 people, and you could see the ones at the front of the group having to stop and wait for the ones at the back, and everything seemed to move agonisingly slowly - by the time we'd finished our lunch they had just started walking up the steps cut into the ice of the glacier.

Again it was an awe inspiring experience to touch the face of a glacier, and I kind of felt sorry for the masses of people who never ventured past the 'Extreme Danger' signs (the physical condition of some of the people on the guided walk up the glacier itself, who had to pass these same signs, made it patently obvious that once you had an ounce of common sense you were perfectly safe
- they simply wouldn't run those trips otherwise).

Both Fox and Franz Josef glaciers have various options for guided trips on the ice itself (for which you need equipment, and someone experienced with you - even I can appreciate the sense in that!). The options are half-day tours, full-day tours and heli-hikes, where you get flown high up the glacier in a helicopter, explore around a bit and then flown back down. I certainly didn't fancy the walking tours after what I'd seen when we'd been to the face of the glacier, so I decided on the heli-hike. This, naturally, was by far the most expensive option, but I reckoned it might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience (which it was I suppose, but in the end I thought it was overpriced compared to the other options - NZ$360 each).

I reckon the flight up along the glacier, flying over these huge pinnacles of towering ice and then landing a little lower down on a relatively flat section of ice was indeed an amazing flight, but it was a very disappointingly short flight, only 10 minutes or so from takeoff to landing (and I spent most of it trying to take photos and video footage when I should have been savoring the view properly).

Once on the ice we had a short wait for the next chopper load of people, and then we all put on crampons. I'm not really sure why, but walking on ice with crampons has been on my ambitions-wish-list for ages, so it was great to get another one ticked off. They really are amazingly simple, but amazingly effective inventions (thanks to the French apparently). One minute your slipping and sliding around in your boots, then with crampons on your as steady as a rock, and I was surprised that they take no getting used to at all, and they don't feel clunky or anything. So off we trekked with our excellent America guide, basically just exploring around the place really. We had an hour or so following our guide and following in the steps he'd chop out of the ice with his huge ice pick, and he found a small ice cave and a pretty big crevesse. In places the ice is a famously beautiful blue (explained here), and so made for some good photos.

So at that stage we'd pretty much done all we could do on the glaciers, and after a couple of more days just chilling out in the town and the backpackers watching movies we moved on to the next town, Greymouth.