NZ Day 13 – Fox Glacier: High altitude hiking

Our heli-hike wasn’t scheduled until midday so treated ourselves to the biggest, greediest breakfast ever. Whilst scoffing through French toast and yoghurt topped granola I read the local paper, the Greymouth Star. There was one story that really defined the NZ experience for us:-

“Farmer finds Ford Cortina Mk3 wrapped round a tree with a skeleton laid out in dying pose trying to escape out of the car window. Police believe it’s in connection of missing man from 1985.” However, I found the real story here so I apologise for the slight exaggeration.

The rest of the breakfast was realising how much of a hicktown Fox was with mothers breastfeeding toddlers (too old for that sort of thing) and barking dogs on Utes. The weather was looking very dodgy with clouds near the mountains which could have meant the helicopter tour was off.

At the tour desk we felt luck was on our side but it felt every minute one of our party delayed us the tour would be off. The helicopter ride only took 10 minutes to ascend the glacier and swoop around for aerial shots and completely confused our field of depth. The glacier looked like a blue and white ripple of iced cake wedged between mountains.

When we landed our glacier guides distributed poles and crampons (spikes for boots). It was a huge group with three trips from the air taxi and each time it landed you had to shield your eyes with ice flying around. The size of the group really slowed things down as well as everyone wanted to take photos and the guides not wanting anyone to stray from the icy path. Still the guides found some cool caves to crawl into for decent photos. We met two English guys who had just graduated from Cambridge and had some club tradition to photograph themselves in ‘wife-beater’ T-shirts. One of the lads was going on to Sandhurst. The chopper ride back brought home how small and insignificant we were in scale.

We left Fox behind to drive as far as we could to Queenstown travelling through the most remotest countryside yet with no houses, farms or animals in sight. However, there was one point where five campervans were on the road at once which spoiled the feeling. At one scenic point there were dozens of people snapping away to get the sunset view then drive off again. The rest of the journey was Kerry getting very upset at the lakeside, mountainous roads making her terrified by the driving until we reached Wanaka around 8:15pm. We were lucky to get a campsite place as normally these offices shut at 8pm.

Kerry needed a stiff drink and we were famished so headed into town with the recommendation of a local curry house, the Bombay Palace. The food was lovely apart from that NZ poppadoms are those nasty microwave ones I hate. Interesting to watch Bollywood pop videos with pervy male characters and raunchy females in fictional nightclubs.