7th April

Another glorious day dawned this morning. We left Haast and drove north up the scenic West Coast Highway towards the glaciers. Our first brief stop was at Knight's Viewpoint where there were glorious views over native bush and sea.

One of the joys of this drive, as I remembered from my last visit, is the fantastic mix of bush and sea views.
We then drove further north around numerous hairpin bends and up and down hills and had another brief stop at Lake Paringa, so peaceful.


We arrived at Fox Glacier about an hour later and drove to the glacier viewpoint. We did not spend long here nor did I take many photos as both Terry and I have vivid memories of our previous visit in 2006. For that visit the weather was totally different - absolutely hosing down with heavy rain. We had booked a half-day walk on the glacier. It was a wonderful experience, walking for ages through warm subtropical rainforest and then onto the freezing cold glacier. For that we had to fix crampons to our boots and were issued with ice picks. We got so wet we were soaked right through to you know where even though we were wearing thick waterproofs and we were completely exhausted at the end of the walk. This photo was taken on Fox Glacier in 2006.


Fortunately today was a far better day.


After our brief visit we drove half an hour north to Franz Josef where we have found ourselves a nice motel unit for 2 nights.
We then visited the Franz Josef Glacier. It was awe- inspiring. We walked for about 15 minutes through rain forest then out onto the moraine deposited by the retreating glacier.


It took a further half hour to reach the face of the glacier


There was a large cave at the glacier face and we waited for the huge chunk of ice top left of it to fall but needless to say, it didn't! I expect it has looked like that for years.
Finally, here are a couple of photos of the sunset over the mountains behind our motel unit:





Another tremendous day.

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