Glaciers & Queenstown (for Jan. 23)

Today was a looong day. We hit the road at 8:30 and reached Franz Josef, at the foot of the glacier of the same name about 10:30. We checked out the visitor centre then went to the Internet centre we had seen in an ad. It was the best we have seen yet – broadband internet on a standard Ethernet cable for $4NZ per hour. Part of the operation is run from an old bus parked out front. Including the bus and the building, they had more than a dozen computers for browsing and they allow you to connect your own laptop. We spent an hour and a half catching up with the last 3 days. The big holdup is the pictures. I will have to look at downsizing them for the blog.

From there we drove up to the glacier parking lot. Fortunately, I took some long distance pictures of the mountain top earlier, because, by the time we got there, it had pretty much clouded over. We walked in to a viewpoint, but elected not to walk right to the face. We had a long way to go today and, as Celeste said, “I have touched glaciers and ice and snow at home.” So we drove on to the Fox Glacier, which was also obscured by cloud. We did take a side road up to a viewpoint though.

I have been meaning to write about their rainforest compared to ours. I was going to say that theirs is much lower growing than the huge evergreens we have on the west coast of North America. Our experience was that, as a general rule, the bush was less than 20 feet tall with occasional trees of 60 or 80 feet. On our trip up the mountain though, we found that when you got higher up the mountain, the character changed to be much more like our west coast than what we had seen at lower altitudes. They still didn’t have the giant trees we have, but the general character of the vegetation was less like the beach and more like our mountains.

We left Fox Glacier around 3 and arrived in Queenstown about 9. Too pooped for any touring tonight. Just a short blog.

We had an interesting experience on the plain after leaving Fox Glacier. I pulled onto the narrow shoulder to take a picture. The shoulder was very soft and gave way under the left front wheel. I couldn’t back out, so flagged down a car to ask them to get a tow truck for us from the next town. (Our Vodafone coverage here is kind of like Rogers coverage at home – not very good in the boonies.) The fellow offered to try to push us out, so, with him and me pushing and Celeste at the wheel, we were back on the road in no time.

We had not had any trouble with insects from the moment we left Regina until now. Celeste got a few bites last night at Hokitika (maybe at the glow worms) and there were some nasty little biting flies at Knights Point Lookout on the coast.

Until the last 3 ½ hours, we were always near the coast, although we seldom saw it. We would drive for a while on a plain, then cross the toe of some mountains to another plain. Sheep, cattle, and, occasionally, farmed deer were grazing. (We have actually seen quite a few deer farms pretty much from day one, and venison seems popular on the few restaurant menus we have seen.) Because we were on flatter ground, the roads were usually a little straighter today, although we must have crossed nearly 20 of those one lane bridges. At Haast, we turned inland climbing up the Haast River gorge through rainforest on the usual mountain roads. After the summit, the land changed almost immediately, just like on our west coast. At first, the mountains seemed quite stark and bare. I am no “Lord of the Rings” aficionado, but for some reason they remind me of that movie. Later, I was reminded of the Kamloops area of BC, with dry, low, rounded mountains, grazing sheep, cattle, and farmed deer, and a few trees where there is shade or water. Later still, it became like the Okanagan with orchards and vineyards until Queenstown.