After we finished the Copland Track, Emily and Alicia dropped me of in Fox Glacier Village where I met up with my flatmates, Williams and Maria and honorary flatmate, Odilia. The three of us spent the night at a backpacker in the village and got up early Friday morning for a guided tour of the glacier.
Our tour started with a short hike (though it felt long to my sore legs) up the valley along the side of the glacier, which gave us some great views.
One of my favorite things about the ice and rock landscape is how it can be so vast but appear so small. The scenery distorts perception of scale - in the photo below, the red arrow is pointing to a dark line which is actually a group of about a dozen people making their way onto the glacier.
Before we could walk on the glacier, we needed to suit up. Crampons are the footwear of choice for romping around on glacial ice. So stylish!
I actually really enjoyed wearing the crampons. I could walk straight down the slippery ice sheet without slipping as long as I gave a good hard stamp with my feet as I went. Looking down, you see the surface of the glacier is covered with rocks that are all melting out of the ice. This time of year you see the most debris on the glacier because it is the end of the long summer melt period.
Our guide lead us up onto the glacier, carving out steps with his ice pick as we went. The neat thing is, every tour is different. Even one day to the next, the glacier is always changing (flowing, like the worlds slowest river) so that stairs that were there one day are gone the next. We had the good fortune of encountering TWO ice tunnels, which were fun to crawl through.
Here is a picture of our guide telling us about the waterfall or the avalanches, or something. The entire day I thought his name was Rab, because that was the name on his jacket (all the other guides had their names monogrammed). Turns out his name was Cole, but he still was a pretty cool guide.
After about 3 hours of hiking up the glacier, we got pretty lost in the icy passages between the crevasses so it was a good thing we had Rab/Cole to lead us out. Even way at the top of the glacier here, it is hard to get perspective on the ice below which stretches out for a few kilometers.
That night, we drove back down the west coast toward Dunedin and spend the night and the following morning in Wanaka, a touristy lake town which was just brilliant with fall colors.
We stopped at a vineyard, but at 9:30 in the morning they weren't offering tastings yet!
On our way out of Wanaka we also hit up Puzzling World, a museum of puzzles and illusions. In one of the rooms, the floor was tilted so far, that gravity seemed to have stopped working. I rode on a slide that felt like it was taking me up hill and the water in the photo below looks like it is flowing straight up the rocks. CRAZY
The Ames room is another cool illusion, brought to fame in the Lord of the Rings movie during one of the scenes in Bilbo's hobbit whole. The entire set was built on an angle, like the room below, so that Gandalf would appear giant and the hobbits would appear small like me!
The best part of puzzling world was the maze. We got stuck in here for about 45 minutes and Maria may or may not have taken the emergency exit in the end, but it was a blast chasing each other around the deceptively difficult maze.
A great end to a great break, now back to Dunedin for two weeks and then... WELLINGTON!
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