After leaving Abel Tasman, we headed south and went to Barrytown which is a tiny village with a hotel/pub. I made a bone carving there which was really fun. Then we drove to Franz Josef to see the glacier. I did a full day hike of the glacier but the weather was terrible. It was cold and pouring down rain the whole day. It was about an hour's hike to the toe of the glacier. We then strapped on crampons and spent about 6 hours hiking up the glacier, through crevasses and ice caves. The ice was a beautiful shade of turquoise blue with lots of waterfalls everwhere. It was hard to enjoy it since I was so wet and cold though and could barely look at the view because my face would get pelted with rain.
The next day we drove to Fox Glacier, but we couldn't get close because the track was closed (maybe due to the heavy rains the day before?). It was pretty though. We drove to Lake Matheson (mirror lake) which should have beautiful views of snowcapped mountains reflected in the lake, but it was so foggy I couldn't see anything. Then we continued driving south to Makaroa. Spent the night there and then drove to Queenstown. The views along these drives have been amazingly beautiful. You could stop every 5 minutes to take pictures but it's hard to really capture the beauty. I took a gondola up to the top of a large hill in Queenstown which had great views of the Remarkables mountains (used in LotR). Today I'm going on a scenic 4WD tour which should be pretty.
