Friday 29th June 2007

We've been really lucky with the weather so far (well, apart from the cold). The West coast of the South Island, especially the area around the Southern Alps gets a lot of rain - which gives everywhere the lush green look - and we'd not had any rain. Until today...

It started in the middle of the night - banging down on our roof. At 7.51am, Nikki could stand it no longer and ran off to the toilet for a wee. When she got back we got ourselves ready and had some bacon and egg sarnies (again!) for breakfast and made our way, slowly, to the Franz Josef Glacier. We hoped that by driving slow the rain would pass.

It didn't! We got to the site of the Glacier and were told that to actually see it you have to go on a 20 minute walk. We didn't think much of it, put on our kags and went for it. We got soaked! We got up as close as we could, but because of the low clouds we couldn't really see anything - it's supposed to be spectacular on a clear day, but on a rainy day like today, we couldn't really appreciate the view of the Glacier.

We headed back to the van and drove onto the Fox Glacier. The entrance to this site was marked with a sign saying that the narrow road was not suitable for large vehicles, cars with trailers and camper vans - but there was no way that was gonna stop me. After the drive we had from Taupo to Napier (Thursday 21st June) I was prepared for anything. The road up to the Glacier view-point was really thick with trees and bendy. With the rain pouring down I thought we were in Jurassic Park! Once again the view of the Glacier wasn't that great, but at least we'd seen it, and this time we didn't have to leave the van!

As pretty much everything around the area was geared towards the Glaciers (walking on them etc), we figured we drive onto the next place which is called Haast. It was a few hours away and the drive was pretty bad as the conditions were still awful. When we arrived, there wasn't much there but we didn't fancy driving for the next few hours to get to Wanaka and so we set up camp for the night. We had our tea quite early then watched films and episodes of LOST on the laptop.

Rain, rain go away - come back another day!