We left Christchurch early enough on Tuesday morning to get the Tranzalpine train across to Greymouth and then hop on our bus over to Franz Josef to the glacier (we were told not to do the Fox glacier because it wasn't as good as Franz).
We met an Israeli girl, Dafna, outside the hostel who was doing almost the exact same journey as us, so she decided to change and come with us since it was the same price. The train journey was spectacular - there was a huge drop on one side of the train where the Waimakorouri river twisted around the canyon. Our train driver also gave us info all the way along - we found out that an iron man competition took place from the Waimakorouri river to Sumner (in Christchurch) every year, covering a total of 237km.. We were also told some handy NZ facts - the sheep population in NZ has dropped from 100 million to 32 million, still 8 times that of the human population.
The more we travelled, the more my imagination got the better of me and the mountains started to look like the spines of sleeping giants who looked like they'd wait until we were close enough to move and flick us off the tracks (I was fairly exhausted so I needed to keep my brain going somehow so I wouldn't miss the huge amount of scenery we had to take in!)..
We passed through some seriously small towns as well - Otira was a town where people were paid to move there years ago, but it's now almost completely empty and it looked like a ghost town when we stopped there for a few minutes, the hotel was just a big house and was fairly dilapidated from lack of use.
By the time we got into Greymouth, we were a lot later than planned and Elaine and I had to run off the train to catch our bus to Franz Josef which was leaving within the next 5minutes. Turns out the bus was waiting at the end of the platform and we had plenty of time, including to catch up with Dafna again. The bus driver was without a doubt the grumpiest Kiwi we have come across and mumbled an awful lot, so we just curled up and tried to get some sleep. Greymouth was fairly grim with very little of interest in there so we were glad to be getting out of there, and the scenery for the start of the journey was pretty similar also so it was safe to sleep!
I woke up for the last hour or so of the journey, passing by some beautiful beaches and then we saw the glacier emerge from the middle of a group of mountains covered in pine trees - it was like looking for someone in an airport, you glance somewhere and you can pick them out a mile away.
We booked into Chateau Franz Josef just in time for the free soup at 6pm and then hit the Blue Ice Bar for a fantastic pizza and "just one" glass of wine (it was free with the food so it would have been rude if we didn't). We ended up chatting to a lovely Fijian couple, Louisa and Jamie, who live in Sydney, having a few (too many) drinks with them and they left us with half a bottle of wine as well as their contact details if we were ever in Sydney, their daughter was the same age as us and she could take us out (or vice versa).
We got changed out of our tracksuit pants (also known as our travellin pants) in the hostel and headed back, for just one more. At the bar, some Kiwi Experience guys started singing "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" to us, which was beyond random. We then got chatting to a small group of English guys (and a Czech) who worked in the local supermarket, feeding us a line that they could have worked as guides on the glacier but the pay was better in the supermarket, and that all the guides did was get drunk every night. We nodded but couldn't really believe them!
We rolled out of the beds the next morning to go to the shop to get breakfast and some supplies for our packed lunch. The shopping trip was tough because there was a mystery smell in the supermarket that turned our stomachs, which were a small bit delicate after our first accidental session in NZ.
We got all set up for the glacier hike on the Main St in Franz Josef, which was too easy to find considering there are only 2 short enough streets in the whole place; we both ignored the suggestions for the waterproof overtrousers and stuck to the shorts plan..Hardcore hikers/total glacier rookies.
Possibly still drunk, we were in fits of laughter on the bus on the way over, especially since we saw Jesse for the second time that morning (the first was topless in our hostel), this time in shorts and hiking boots beside a van on the dried up river bed - typical!
We all walked to the foot of the glacier in the searing heat (great way to lose a hangover = sweat it out), and then split into 5 groups - Elaine and I jumped into the bunch for groups 1 and 2 and refused to budge when it was too big, even hungover we were ambitious! We ended up in group 2 with Simon (a young tanned Kiwi, pretty easy on the eye too), who said "sweet team" for the whole day.
we went up the stony part of the glacier first, then put on our crampons (as Elaine said, they made us feel like "intrepid travellers") and hit the ice. The clouds came down then and it got a fair bit colder (thankfully, it would have been fairly uncomfortable in the heat all day). We all got to introduce ourselves, and it turned out there was one other Irish girl and the rest seemed to be all Kiwi Experience people, i.e. English gap year students, one in particular thought she was fantastic and knew everything there was to know, she spent the day on Simon's shoulder plaguing him with questions!
The day on the glacier was simply spectacular - we got into some fairly tight cracks in the blue ice though, which meant that the Brazilian girl behind me needed myself and the woman behind her to talk her through it since there was nowhere else for her to go but forwards, not for claustrophobics!
When we stopped moving for lunch, I was suddenly freezing and couldn't wait to get going again, especially because the world and his wife kept asking us if we were cold or not! We felt like spelling out the obvious for them: 1) we're on a glacier; 2) we're not moving around; 3)we're in feckin shorts!
The funniest part of the day was when the inquisitive English teen fell into a small hole in the glacier when we were going through a crack, she was perfectly fine but it was purely because she had been talking instead of looking where she was going! She didn't learn from it and kept talking almost straight away afterward - she may have thought she'd had a near death experience of some sort (although she was clearly really embarrassed because she desperately wanted to impress Simon).
We finished off by climbing into a hole in the glacier for photos and then "cruising" to a natural archway/cave in the ice before heading back to the bus. It was at this stage, when the crampons were off and there was no more glacier to look at, that we began to feel the blisters from the hiking boots.
After a full day on the ice, Elaine and I decided it was possibly the best job you could have and enquired the next morning. We clearly didn't look like potential guides because the guy kind of tried to talk us out of it! It was definitely the best part of the trip so far, even though it's just the start and we've done some cool stuff already, it will be very tough to beat!
