I'M AT: Rainforest Retreat, Franz Josef Village, where they seem to have used all the wooden slats off the bottom of the bunks to make the walls, and where pushbutton showers are a luxury; and Matterhorn South, Wanaka, which is alpine-style and pretty cool - all the cooler for having the number two seed in Saturday's triathlon staying there.
So, there are something like 180 glaciers growing or shrinking their way down and up the mountains they call the Southern Alps. I walked on one of them, and to another, and the latter was cheaper, warmer and far better.
The Franz Josef Glacier is named after a Hapsburg Emperor, and is currently growing by roughly one metre a day. It's a dirty slab of white pinched between some sharp steeps, and for 130 dollars you can get yourself nice and cold and wet walking up it. The guiding company were excellent, very well organised, and distributed our little bags with iron claws on them, for strapping onto the boot. And from there we were off, slushing up a staircase that had to be iceaxed clean frequently, to give us a nice surface on which to grip.
Regular iceaxeing was a big part of the day, as it goes, and it's not often you can say that. Our guide Blair was all surfer-dude and wielded his big iceaxe like a bear, tearing new flats for us to traverse. And we got in a lot of walking, up over ledges, holding onto ropes, and down the sides of ice slides, edging our way and falling heavily on each foot to prevent slipping. I almost came a cropper at one point, spreadeagled above a churning potion of cold, but, thanks to the kind shove of an Israeli gentleman, who became increasingly obsessed with his iceaxe as the day went on, I escaped with only the dramatic whoosh of collapsing ice below me.
So, the ice is a deep, rich blue up the glacier, far different to the rock-strewn muck of the lower slopes. And we had to squeeze through a very, very tight corridor to progress, a squeeze which took ages, and left us wet and shivering. So we had a nibble of lunch, and eventually the feeling was welcomed back into the toes.
Overall, we walked for about 5 hours on the ice, up and down and through and round, and came back down a different path, to the side, and then onto rock, and then down, down again, through corridors, a maze of ice, and then we were done. It was interesting to see the churn of ice that close, and certainly different, but at the final count not all that enthralling.
Near Wanaka, though - in Mount Aspiring National Park, a place of deep, stunning, lush, wonder - there's a much less well-known beast, the Rob Roy Glacier, named, at a guess, after Rob Roy. And to get to it you need to walk through a thick forest of beech, by the rush and splash of the meltwater river. Now and again, through the trees, you glimpse a snicket of white, and all around are butterflies, and dandelions, and moths, and a parrot called a kea, with its thick green neck, cheeky, would nick your food, like a flying monkey.
After about an hour of the walk, the view opens up and you see the stunning, heartbreaking sight of the glacier, high up on the mountain, its terminal face hundreds of feet above, in a broad valley of meadow and rock, scree and pine. All down the wet rock opposite tumble waterfalls of melt, and now and again, the rumble of a collapsing cave, deep inside the cold animal.
The scale is immense, and the glacier is curled and cracked, linen white and pastel blue, and speckled by dappled shadow.
It's one of the best hikes I've ever done, and to crown it all, I was shuttled there and back by a clearly quite-mad Kiwi called Brenda, who interrupted the niceties of gentle conversation with a long monologue about her troubled teenage years, her lies, and her redemption in Wanaka.
She's one cold animal that this soul won't be melting.
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