Nov 5th – One doesn’t stop at Franz Josef without checking out the glaciers of which there are two major ones in the area. The Franz Josef glacier is 12 km long and the Fox glacier is 13 km long. Similar to the Columbia Icefields in Canada, you can’t really do them justice by just looking at them from below.

So….up we went! In a helicopter with four other people. We sort of lucked out because our flight was only supposed to be 20 minutes to one of the glaciers and back but they put us on the wrong copter so we got the 30 minute trip to see both glaciers. It was a very sunny day and was actually quite warm up there. Where we landed, we were 3000+ feet up and the ice was 150+ feet thick below us.

We were quite concerned about our trip from Franz Josef to Wanaka because we had to go through the Haast Pass, which is where a major landslide two months ago killed a Canadian couple. In the end it wasn’t that bad and there wasn’t much of a tie-up where they are repairing the road. George read in the paper that the repair work of the past two months has already cost $2M and is expected to last until April.  Living and working in mountainous territory comes with its own challenges.

The drive through to Wanaka was beautiful as we felt like we were driving through the Rockies. Lovely mountain vistas reflected in the lakes with snow peaked mountains in the background. Wanaka is a holiday town at the end of one of the lakes. Dinner was at an outdoor cafe down by the lake…a somewhat idyllic end to a perfect day.