Big Trip

Would you believe it? After arriving in the rain, another day dawned bright & sunny, with just a few fluffy clouds. We could hear the helicopters flying as we awoke, and so quickly booked ourselves on about the only free flight of the day, over both the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers. It's hard to describe what it's like flying over glaciers in a helicopter, really. It all started gently, with a flight up towards the township of Franz, just to get used to flying in a helicopter. Then we turned in towards the mountains, and of course, the pilot did that thing that they do in every film you see taken from a helicopter: he flew up the hillside, giving us that great view of everything suddenly dropping away as we flew over the top. I'm sure they must teach that kind of thing in pilot school. In this case, the drop revealed the Franz Josef glacier below, and we flew down & over it at pretty low altitude. The surface is amazing. It's sort of sculpted into what cookery books would probably refer to as "soft peaks", but instead of egg white in between, there are crevasses which get bluer the deeper they go. We flew up the glacier, along the Southern Alps, with clear views of the peaks of Mounts Tasman and Cook, and then down to the snow field at the top of the Fox glacier, where we landed. We took the obligatory photos, threw a few snowballs, though they were actually made from the inches-deep melting ice, rather than any fresh snow, and then got back into the helicopter. The pilot then zig-zagged down the Fox glacier, which is highly entertaining, I can tell you. At the first zig, Sarah exclaimed something which caused the pilot to look round & check that she was OK (she was) before starting the zag. Another highly memorable experience, which suffered only from being about two hours too short (it was 30 mins in all!).
We went back & packed up the van, and headed off to Peak Viewpoint, which is only about 12km down the road towards the coast, but gives breathtaking views of the glacier in the middle of the rainforest. By that time, the clouds were really gathering, and so there probably weren't too many more flights that day.
We went down a very narrow, unmade road to Gillespie's Beach. Wow. It's a massive expanse of wild pebble beach. The pebbles were interesting too, with all sorts of coloured veins & patterns. The whole beach was covered in huge pieces of driftwood - tree trunks & roots - and stretched as far as the eye could see in both directions. Fantastic waves - you could feel the spray 20 feet away, and the roar as the water receded over the pebbles was incredible. I could have sat there all day listening. Erin & I played a bit of didge on the beach, but I felt so humbled by the noise of the sea that all inspiration left me.
Finally, we made our way up to Franz for the night.