Glacier ups and downs

We spent two days in Franz Josef Glacier waiting for a break in the weather to go up with the heli. Our first booking on Thursday 9:15 was cancelled.. so we rebooked to Friday 13:00 and on Thursday morning we hiked to the glacier and looked at it from afar.

We also did the Tatare tunnel walk where we hiked up to a 340m long tunnel once used for getting more water to the goldmine on the other side of the mountain and walked through 10cm of ice cold water in the pitch black tunnel to the other side.(see videos) Quite an adventure!

In the afternoon we relaxed in the glacier hotpool and sauna.

we had put ourselves on the standby list for any available heli flight in the morning on Friday and were lucky to get a call for the 9:30 one. When we arrived at 9:00 we already saw the low clouds coming in and heard again that it was cancelled. Very unfortunate! We drove to Fox glacier only to discover that the road to the valley had been washed away... not much luck today!
 

we took the next path into the valley and hiked for about an hour to get a glimpse of Fox Glacier in the distance.

Our plan was to get as far south as possible today and we made it to lake Hawea. We are camped in the middle of nowhere enjoying the beautiful views. 

against the sandflies :-)

some nice stops on the way