Ooooh Helicopters!

This morning we woke up to a bit of blue sky but a lot of cloud. We had a helicopter flight booked for midday, taking us over to the two glaciers but we had a bit of time to kill so we went for a drive around Fox Glacier township. We saw a sign to the lookout so we went there first.
There are some fairly spectacular cloud formations over the glacier here.
After viewing from the far away lookout, we decided we still had plenty of time so we went for a drive to the actual glacier, where you can do a bit of a walk and come out next to it. Amazingly, the road looked like this - total sub-tropical rainforest. Freaky.
After walking for about 20 minutes we came out on this lookout. It was sort of misty and the sun was shining so there's a bit of haze.
This glacier has been advancing since 1985, unlike the Franz Josef glacier which has been retreating for 250 years.
These photos can't begin to describe the amazing size of these things. They are just enormous. And incredible.

We went back to town to the helicopter office but the weather had gotten a lot worse so our flight was cancelled. It was really disappointing. They offered us a refund but it's not the same as flying over the glaciers and landing on one!

So we got in the car and headed off to Queenstown. It's a long drive, over five hours, through some spectacular scenery. We drove through national parks with amazing forests and waterfalls, then got to the drier region near Queenstown and passed massive gorges with rivers thundering along at the bottom, but not many trees on the hills. We stopped in Wanaka on the way, which was very pretty, and carried on to Queenstown. We stayed at the Sofitel, which was just gorgeous, particularly since we had a room looking over the lake.

Fox Glacier

We left Punakaiki this morning and headed for Fox Glacier (yes, that's the actual name of the town). We stopped in Franz Josef on the way, to have a look at their glacier too.

See all those little coloured dots? Those are people who are closer to the glacier than we were.
This is the river created by the melting glacier.
And here's a shot of the glacier again. It was quite amazing and we could walk on all those rocks all the way to the base of the glacier, but it started raining so we headed back to the car.
You might have heard about two men who were killed when a part of the glacier fell on them about two months ago? That was this glacier. But they had jumped over the rope and gotten closer than they were meant to.

We got back in the car and drove on to Fox Glacier. We headed straight to our accommodation, Te Weheka Inn, because by now the rain was coming down in bucketloads.

We didn't go very far for the rest of the afternoon because it was dark and pouring with rain. Staying in our room with some magazines was far preferable. Dinner too. And it was a very nice dinner. We were just hoping the weather would improve in the morning for our helicopter flight over the glacier.