Home » Australia New Zealand » Detailed Travelogue on Australia and New Zealand

Detailed travelogue on Australia and New Zealand

Detailed Travelogue on Australia and New Zealand

Larry
2006-05-27 03:23:16

Displayed times (last time: )

glaciers. One in particular interested me: a
hiking tour out onto the glacier itself. For this, there was a choice of a
full-scale hike up the glacier (6 hours) or, for NZ$155 (US$111), you could
take a "heli-hike", where you're flown high up onto the the glacier in a
helicopter, then left to hike around as a group for 2 hours. The price was
a bit steep, but I figured I'd be here only once, so decided to go for it.
I called, and booked the last empty seat for the next morning.
The heli-hike was available only at Fox Glacier, so I first had to drive
to Franz Joself, then go onto Fox. When I reached Fox and checked in, we
all went into the back room to put on special snow-boots and get overcoats,
but the weather on the mountain looked uncertain. Sure enough, the weather
was declared bad, and we were told to wait for a bit -- that it might clear
up. The weather down below was actually fine, but there was too much cloud
cover at the point where we were to set down. An hour or two passed, and
then the word came down that the clouds still hadn't cleared. We were told
that if we wanted, we could wait for a 2:00pm flight, but at this point, I
didn't want to waste anymore time just sitting around a mountain lodge.
Clinching the decision was when a couple also waiting for the heli-hike told
us that the same thing had happened the previous day, and all the flights
then were cancelled as well. So, after getting a refund, I headed back to
Franz Josef (the better of the two glaciers), to look around.
The Franz Josef Glacier is very accessible. The glacier is only about a
15-minute walk from the car park, and you can walk right up to the base of
it. You're supposed to climb it only with guided supervision, though it's
very easy to just hike around the base a bit. It's a huge glacier, going
all the way ...

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 [63] 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120