South Island: Day 4/5/6 (Queenstown, Fox Glacier, Bushman's Centre, Punakaiki)

Day 4 wasn’t too terribly exciting.  It was one of our days of travel.  We left Queenstown early in the morning and arrived in Fox Glacier Township mid- to late-afternoon.  We did have a couple of interesting stops along the way.  We visited the fruit orchard again, and this time we purchased some amazing fruit leather.  We stopped at a random beach, and I took a picture of a really cool tree.  The one big stop was at Bushman’s Travel Centre.  This is the kind of back country place that exists purely as a truck stop.  There is no town; there are only the two buildings and some fenced-in animals to occupy the tourists.  I must also mention the ginormous bug that graces the outer wall of the building that my mother insisted on photographing, although I have no idea why any human would desire to see that bug ever again.  This place also serves possum and has a policy of ‘You catch it, we’ll cook it.’  I understand this includes roadkill.  A very interesting place.

Anyways, we make it through this back country and arrive at our hostel at the Fox Glacier.  This was a really nice hostel.  It was raining and there wasn’t anything to do in town, so after having a really good meal, we borrowed some movies from the front desk and settled in to have a movie night.  (Because of the weather and our lack of transportation, we did the same thing on the next night as well.)  This was an excellent plan because I finally saw Whale Rider, a movie about the Maori culture and how it affects a girl.  It won all kinds of awards and is a very good movie.  We also saw Wag the Dog, which I find hysterical.  It’s a satire on the American government, and everyone should see it as well.

Day 5 was considerably more exciting as it was the day of our trek up the Fox Glacier.  It was still pouring, so we borrowed waterproof boots, pants, and jackets from the company.  My boots didn’t fit correctly, so I ended up wearing three pairs of heavy socks to fill up the empty space.  This was good in the end as it prevented the base layer of socks from getting too wet (those socks being my own).  We piled into a rickety bus that had considerable trouble getting started, and off we went!  There were two guides, a guy (from America) and a girl (from not New Zealand, I don’t remember where).  My mom and I ended up with the girl, Becky.  It was a fairly easy hike up to the glacier, taking only about 45 minutes.  We had to climb over the terminal moraine (the rock debris pushed down the mountain by the glacier), and while that was somewhat difficult, I really enjoyed it because I love climbing around on rocks.  Right before we reached the glacier we stopped to put our crampons on our shoes, and off we went!

I should point out several things here.

First, the Fox Glacier is an amazing geological piece because it is a glacier that is surrounded by rain forest and ends only a few hundred meters from the sea.  This only happens in two other places: the Franz Joseph Glacier (about 30 minutes from the Fox Glacier) and somewhere in Chile or something like that.  It is pretty cool.

Second, I don’t do well on ice.  I grew up in the south, far enough south to where if anything even resembling frozen water falls from the sky or appears on the ground, everything shuts down.  I don’t know how to ski well, I don’t ice skate with any kind of skill, I don’t enjoy walking on ice, and I certainly don’t know how to drive on it.  I would be fine if I didn’t get so nervous because then I wouldn’t tense up, and being tense is what makes ice so dangerous.  But there we have it.  I was seriously outside my comfort zone on the glacier.

My mother, on the other hand, is apparently descended from Eskimos or penguins or something, because she was practically jumping around on the glacier and seriously disrupting my sense of balance.

No, it was not as bad as that.  I really enjoyed hiking up the glacier, and it is cool to be at the highest point and be surrounded by ice and still see the forest beyond the edge.  It was raining the entire time we were hiking up the moraine, but as soon as we got to the ice, the rain let up, and by the time we reached the end of our trek, it had stopped completely.  Of course, as soon as we had our crampons off, it started again and was even worse than before, but at least we were done with the ice.   The trek down was more treacherous than the trek up because all of the rain had made the ice melt faster, so the stairs that had been cut into the ice were all but gone, and we relied on our crampons much more.

When it cleared up that afternoon, I really wanted to go do the tramp around the lake, but we couldn’t because it was too far away to walk, and we didn’t have a separate means of transportation.  We settled for an early dinner and another good movie night before crashing into bed.

Day 6 was our longest day of travel.  We left at something like 8 in the morning and didn’t get to Nelson till about 7:30 at night.  We had a ton of stops during the day, though, so those took up a lot of time.  I have only just realized that we visited the Bushman’s Centre on this day, not Day 4, so transplant everything you read about it on Day 4 to Day 6.

Our major stop on this day, the stop I was most excited about, was the stop at Punakaiki.  This is a little town near some national parks on the coast, and it is famous for its Pancake Rocks.  These are limestone layers that have been eroded away over the years so that it looks like columns of ‘pancakes’ all stacked up on one another.  There are some really cool ‘surge pools’ where the water crashes up during the tidal flow against the walls of the rocks.  It was way cool, and I had been talking about this stop for roughly the entire trip.  I was so happy we finally got to stop there!