27th-28th December 2008: Franz Josef, Wanaka & Queenstown

On 27th, we had a full day's walk booked on the Franz Josef Glacier with Lucy and Rich. Franz is one of only three glaciers in the world that descend into temperate rainforest - the others being Fox Glacier, just down the road, and one in Argentina. It's an easy walk to the face, which is only 240m above sea level.

We donned crampons and stepped onto the ice. The guides put much time into cutting staircases with their pickaxes so that walking on the ice is extremely safe and easy. The down side of this was a lot of waiting around for the track to be built, but we did manage to climb a fair way up - around three-quarters of the way up the first ice fall at 600m.

While on the ice fall we had some fun squeezing through narrow crevasses and admiring the very blue ice. We also met our first kea of the holiday - perhaps a bit of a funny place to find a parrot.

We had planned to drive further from Franz but, after our sizeable walk, the hot tub back at Rainforest Retreat was just too tempting, so we spent another night in the civilisation of a proper campsite and enjoyed an evening with Lucy and Rich.

The next morning we set off early to get to Queenstown in good time, as we had an amount of faff to do before our first Great Walk the next day. The drive over the Haast Pass is impressive, moving from West Coast rainforest to alpine scrub, and it was painful to drive past many viewpoints and waterfalls without stopping. We did take a quick peek at the Fox Glacier on our way.

We had a quick lunch stop in Wanaka, which proved to be more or less a one-street town overlooking a spectacular lake, and pressed on to Queenstown, a larger town overlooking an even more spectacular lake. Even our cheap and cheerful hotel had an awesome view.

Having accomplished hut tickets and luggage transfers, we met Mike and Lara for a curry together with Lucy and Rich. Lovely to spend some time with old friends! The next morning we returned our camper van - the end of a week of driving - and got on a bus to start our tramping week.