Our bodies were aching and we were ready for some ground action so we headed up towards the wild and rugged west coast. This involved our longest stints of driving (matt was a trooper and drove like the wind!), sometimes all day for a couple of days. The scenery was stunning...
But the weather wasn't getting any better and life in the van was starting to wear a bit, if you know what I mean....
We drove through Mt Cook National Park (we did the chopper ride over this when we were driving down the East Coast) and stopped to see the awesome Fox and Frans Josef Glaciers! Out of 140 glaciers in the region, these are the only two that penetrate as far as the lower rainforests (they are ginormous!)which is a result for us non-glacier-trekking folks as it was only a 40 min walk away!
A glacier is 'a huge moving mass of old winter snow compressed to ice, descending down valley about 100,000 times slower than a river'. However, glaciers the world over are melting rapidly, surprise surprise, and so as they retreat, they stir up mounds of rubble leaving behind a big mess which looks downright ugly, especially in comparison to the sparkling views of the glaciers we saw from the chopper. But, at the end of the day, it was still a glacier and how many of those do you see every day?!
Next on the agenda was the township of Punakaiki, gateway to limestone country, where limestone formations that began forming 30 million years ago have created piles of rocks that look like pancake stacks (I suppose I see a similarity..)
And when conditions are right, ocean swells thunder into the caverns beneath and the water blasts up through the blowholes. We got lucky...
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