Return to Ice Mountain

29th January - Franz Josef glacier, South Island

You may recall that our journey to Ice Mountain in China was called off due to bad weather. Well this time it was to be different. 'New Zealand' is dutch for bad weather and so rain, sleet or tsunami, the Kiwis are never put off. Except cloud maybe.

Anyway this glacier was named after the flowing, snow capped beard of FJ, the Emperor of Austria back in the 1800s. It is a good natured brute, in that it has made its way down to ground level rather than sitting on the top of a mountain a la European glaciers. This means you can almost get a taxi onto the ice.

We took a half day tour, based on our lack of time and some advice from a girl in Australia of how 'you should only do a full day on the ice if you're super fit'. Some advice should be shoved back down the mouth from where it inadvertently spurted. If you go there, you need to do a full day to make decent inroads into the ice. That said, our trip was still fantastic, and our eccentric guide AJ (an ex pro rock climber) took us to some fine, deep crevasses as you can see in the pictures.

Our trip was slightly held up by some idiot going jogging on the ice in his shorts and Nikes and getting stuck. He was lucky, the usual outcome of such tomfoolery is icy death. As we came back down, we were granted a view of how fragile the glacier can be, as some truck sized pieces of ice fell into the stream at its foot.