After leaving Nelson, we drove on to Lake Rotoiti, perhaps the most beautiful and peaceful place we have been so far.It amazes me how such a lovely location – a huge blue lake, surrounded by mountains and greenery – can be so quiet. There were a dozen cars there, a few people swimming, a couple of boats skimming across the water and a few ducks terrorising the visitors for food. The atmosphere and air was so fresh and clear.
That evening we drove through – again – endlessly gorgeous views. Our car is of course not the quickest, added to which we wanted to take in the views. But we knew we were driving slowly when a huge
logger truck overtook us.Strangely, the town where a long river meets the sea was really ugly. Greymouth lives up to its name, one of the least inspiring river towns I can remember. It was, well... grey. The hostel was a funny place too – 60 NZ dollars (28 GBP/30 Euros) bought us what looked like a converted horsebox sitting outside, with a bed and a fridge and nothing more. As the wind came up unexpectedly, the whole thing shook and we wondered if we would still be in the same location the following morning.
Yesterday we drove onto Franz Josef, a town at the base of a glacier which was named after the
Austrian Emperor after some Austrian dignitaries had visited it in the late 19th century. In case you don't know... a glacier is old, unmelted snow which gets bigger and bigger each time snow falls again. The pressure of each fall compacts it down and, like water, this pressure causes it to move. But it travels 100,000 times slower than a river.Franz Josef glacier's edge has moved an incredible amount over the years and still can advance or retreat by around 5 metres per day. We stood at Peter's Pond and took some pictures of it in the distance, knowing that 10 years before that spot was covered in ice. Although it has advanced over the last few years too, seeing the massive reduction of ice in the valley gives a very real of the effect of global warming.
The walk up to the Glacier was very hard – rocky, steep and l
ots of loose rocks. We'd been told “don't worry about the sign telling you to go to stop unless you're experienced” but after an hour we saw two people coming the opposite direction. “Was it worth it?” Nicki asked. They looked at each other, shrugged and said things like “wasn't as good as we expected... very slippery... still a long way to go...”. That was enough for us – we turned around and sped back to the lookout spot for long-distance pics.On the way to FJ, we picked up a hitch-hiking Canadian girl called Jamie.
She had a huge amount of stuff but she said this had been no problem as she had never had to wait more than a few minutes for rides, mostly with locals. We found it amazing that this young girl was so comfortable to hitch-hike, something we would both hesitate to do back at home., But it seems in tune with this country – the atmosphere is of sharing, taking care of the environment and it's difficult to imagine that any harm would come to her here.That evening, the sky turned into an amazing sunset and Nicki caught the beauty of it on her new camera.
