The day began with a drive beside those fabulously steep and enormous West coast mountains, spontaneously pulling up briefly at a gallery of a local photographer who took brilliant photos of the local landscapes. He gave us some good hints on things to visit so we pushed on through the deep luscious forests and down to the coast to Lake Okarito.
There we wandered along a well made boardwalk over a swamp and past strange silken clusters atop the reeds and then up into the densely forested hills. Despite her poor foot giving her a hard time Georgie soldiered on and we meandered about through beautiful ferny forests, listening to the different species of cicadas chirping their individual songs. One green species went tock tock…. tock tock… tock tock… leading us to believe at first that it was a frog, until we managed to eyeball the little beastie.
From there we drove on to the very famous Franz Joseph Glacier and Rod wandered off amongst the crowds of other tourists to do the trek right up to the closest viewing point. Georgie originally planned to stay behind to nurse her aching foot, but she decided to follow a Department of Conservation guide who took a group through the lush forests to a lower view point of the glacier.
In the past ten years the glacier had retreated a few hundred metres, so no one was able to get too close, but what we saw was impressive enough.
After that we continued on to the nearby Fox Glacier where unfortunately it began to rain, so we decided to do without the walk up to the viewing point in the chilling drizzle, and felt satisfied with just looking at it from down in the valley. But we did meander off into some delightful mossy forests nearby, and those forests turned out to be the most wonderful and glorious bushland that we had encountered to that point. It was an enchanted forest, a total delight, dark and mossy, every surface swathed with dripping green fuzzy soft cushions. In that wonderful forests we found an even better view point of the Fox Glacier.
As the day wore on – it wasn’t getting dark, the Sun doesn’t set until well after 9 pm – but we figured we had better get some kilometres behind us, so we took off with the vague plan of finding somewhere to spend the night that wouldn’t cost us the Earth. We lucked it in with a cottage down at a tiny beach village where the owner gave us some local venison to cook up for dinner. Yum.
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Totally magical. A joy to see your photos. Thank you ?