Glacier Hiking

At the very top of the mountains in the Southern Alps, Franz Joseph Glacier is fed by up to 40 metres of snow a year. Imagine how long it would take you to clear that off your drive!
There are 2 ways to get up there and go out on the ice - either the hard and cheap way by walking up from the bottom, or the expensive and easy way - being dropped off by a helicopter. We decided on the heli-hike as it promises to get you higher up the mountain than you would get by a full days hiking. What they didn't tell us however is that more often than not the helicopters don't leave the ground due to bad weather. With it snowing or raining 2 days out of 3 there isn't usually great visibility up there so the helicopters can't always fly. This surprised me as I thought that there would be nothing a New Zealand helicopter pilot likes more than the challenge of flying blindly into a cloud and not knowing whether his aircraft is going to be dashed to pieces on some jagged granite. In the 70's the New Zealanders pioneered a way of catching wild deer for breeding stock by chasing them over mountains with helicopters, going down to an altitude of 6 feet and getting a mate to dive on top of them! These guys are a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
So we couldn't do the heli-hike, but opted for the full day trek, and it pissed down. It was the sort of rain where you get wet just by thinking about going outside, and no amount of waterproof clothing would keep us dry.

Our guide for the day was Conan - yes, Conan is his real name (pic left). But he resembled Action Man more than Conan the Barbarian, both in his actions and his appearance. At one point I thought I could see a switch in the back of his head that would make his eyes swivel.






It wouldn't have been a complete day without someone having a little accident. This is the ice cavern that Andrea fell into. She was ok though, but if she hadn't been at least we would have found out whether rescue helicopter pilots are brave enough to fly through clouds