Wednesday – Thursday March 2 and 3 – Drive baby drive – to Wanaka and beyond…

The next day, after we returned to our civilized selves, where we really appreciated trhe value of good bathrooms and showers, we had set to drive to Wanaka, a scenic town about 75 minutes from Queenstown which also sits on a lake and is starting to rival Queenstown in terms of adventure sports and activities. Its about 5 years behind, which is pretty good considering most everywhere else is at least 10 years behind…We ended up going to the lake, and to a fascinating museum called the Puzzle Museum. Check out their website here

They have some great optical illusions, including a room of holograms and a room of faces of famous people where the faces and especially the eyes seem to follow you as you walk around the room. You have to see it to believe it!

We had set as our goal to get to Fox Glacier that day, which is about a 6 hr drive from Queenstown, with stops and whatnot. We intended to go on a heli-hike, where they helicopter you to a spothigh on the glacier and lead you on a hike for 2 hours on pristine parts of the glacier, where you might be lucky and see an ice cave, which are very hard to get to and rare in most parts of the world. Unfortunately, the weather is very variable around the glacier, because in the summer its melting and seems to create its own weather – in the winter the glaciers are more stable and less likely to throw uo weather problems. It turns out we managed to get to Fox in time, but the clouds came in and they cancelled our tour for the day. Well, we thought, we can go tomorrow, since we were aware of the variability of the weather and were staying there for the night anyways. It turns out that earlier in the day on Wednesday it had been clear enough to go, but we couldn’t have made it any earlier that day, what with the Routeburn the day before. On Thursday we wake up and the weather looks to be great – except as we later find out, on the glaciers – I say glaciers because there are two accessible glaciers in the area, Fox and Franz Josef. We had switched to a heli-hike the next day at Franz Josef, to make our Thursday driving easier. Well, the weather was great, but the only 2 clouds evident on the entire South Island of NZ seemed to be hovering over the two glaciers. After waiting around for a few hours, they cancelled the flights for that day and advised even the next day would not have much chance of flights – sometimes it can be bad weather for 2 weeks, then good weather everyday - you just never know. So we didn’t manage to do a heli-hike – we settled for a short hike to the face of the glacier, and I have some pictures of that below.

I should have known better. This wasn’t my first time trying to fly near glaciers – in Alaska we had tried to do something similar near Denali, and that was cancelled 3 times over the course of a week – so with this try, I have had 6 overflights cancelled in a row – perhaps someone is trying to tell me something….

We then Drove to Christchurch via the West Coast, stopping in Hokitika and Arthurs Pass along the way, where we saw a Kea – they are quite like pigeons, very annoying birds…