Wednesday 20 October 2010

Week Off Day 4 & 5, Franz Joseph

On the first of these two day we spent on a bus from queenstown, stopping at various places on the way. We got the our hostel (the rainforest retreat) which as you can imagen was in the middle of rainforest area. We arrived in the evening and there was nothing really for us to do, so we entered a rock, paper, scissors competition in the hostel pub. Unfortunatly i didn't win and felt a bit robbed.

Our second day was a bit more interesting though, we had booked a full day hike up the Franz Joseph Glacier. It's an awesome glacier and one of the only 3 in the world that goes from an alpine region and ends up in a rainforest area. Unforunatley for us though we were unable to get any pictures because it was either throwing it down or hailing for the entire day. When putting it like that it does not sound very good, but the ice was alot bluer as all the dirt had been washed off. But it was epecially good because the rain and hail caused avalanched. We saw 5 in total, one of which was especially big and heard another avolanch whilst we were climbing through a 30 metre deep cravas (that was a bit of a hairy moment). The hike consisted of climbing through many deep cravases, some of which were extremely tight to squeeze through and also a few ice caves. I wanted to get a helicopter to the top of the glacier but unfortunatly was dinied again due to the weather being too bad. To make up for this we went to the glacial hot pools, they was located in rainforest with 3 open air pools, one 36 degrees, one 38 degrees and another 40 degrees. It was very relaxing and we spent a long time there before heading to the bar.

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