Glacier country

New Zealand, it is said, has a bit of every landscape in the world. Sometimes their juxtaposition is pretty odd! Nowhere more so that in Franz Josef. Here you sit, in subtropical rainforest in blazing sunshine (and then torrential rain …) with the coastline less than a mile away, with snowy mountains just above you. Within those mountains, infact at times only 300 metres from the coast, lie 16 glaciers. One of these is the fastest moving glacier around, Franz Josef itself. This moves up to 1.5 metres a day! A small plane that crashed here in the accumulation zone was down at the bottom only 6 years later.

Which segues nicely into what we did next … yup, we took a small plane over it! We arrived on a sunny afternoon after a drive from Hokitika that had involved 4 seasons in one day. On Lonely Planet’s recommendation, we had taken a 100km detour to do one of the ‘top 10 great drives in the world’ down to Jackson’s Bay. Hmmm … sometimes you just have to doubt the wisdom of its writers! Driving across the Nazca desert? Yes. Driving through Death Valley, or indeed large swathes of desert and canyons? Definitely. This straight road through scrubby bush? Nah. It said the views of the Southern Alps were unforgettable. Alas we have forgotten. No, I am sure on a clear day they would be amazing, but that day they were invisible through ominous black clouds and driving rain. We did stop near the end to look out for blue penguins, but no to them, as well. What we DID get on this brief, five minute stop, was a van full of sandflies! Literally hundreds of the little blighters managed to get inside and start their inexorable biting. The War of the Sandflies commenced. Thankfully, they are slower and stupider than mossies, and we enjoyed a half hour of terribly un-Buddhist wholesale slaughter involving the whole family.