The Glaciers and the West Coast

Charlie was fixed and ready to go the afternoon of my last post and we left Wanaka pretty much soon after he was done, heading towards the little village of Haast, where we spent our first night in our newly fixed van.

Haast doesn't really have much to report about, they've spilt the area into 3 sections; Haast Township/Village, Haast Junction and Haast Beach, in my opinion they should have put the 3 areas together and maybe have had a decent sized village out of it. But hey, thats just my opinion!

From Haast we headed north towards the glaciers. Fox glacier was first, which we got a really good view of. I had done a 1/2 day glacier walk on Fox glacier a couple of years back so we decided to do our own glacier walk on the Franz Josef glacier instead, which is where we headed to that same evening. The rain was still following us unfortunately but our 1/2 day glacier walk on Franz Josef the day after was absolutely wonderful, the weather cleared up for the second half of the walk and we got some stunning views of the glacier and the surrounding area.

We passed through the West coast of the South Island pretty quickly, it was still raining - pretty heavily at times and the towns of Greymouth and Westport didn't really have much to offer other than a petrol stop!

We took the Lewis pass across the South Island, stopping off at Hamner springs for a soak in their thermal hotpools before heading to Kaikoura, where we saw even more fur seals and saw a sperm whale and the most dolphins I've ever seen in my life when we did a whale watching tour. I'll try and get some pictures up of the dolphins/whale when I can.

And now we're back in Blenheim, back at the hostel myself and Stacy stayed in when we were working here, just passing through for 2 nights to catch up with some friends who are still here, get some washing done and in Stacy's case, getting her fix of baking done before we head to Picton this afternoon for the ferry to Wellington. North Island here we come!