This weekend I decided to take a trip to see Fox Glacier and Franz Josef Glacier. It was kind of a last minute trip, but it turned out to be AMAZING!

I left on Saturday morning, and headed up Highway 6 to the west coast. Actually, I took the Crown Range Road directly to Wanaka, which is a smaller road with lots of curves and hills - it is really a lot of fun to drive on.

Once over the pass, I stopped at Lake Wanaka, which is really quite pretty. Wanaka itself is like a smaller version of Queenstown, with a touristy atmosphere and a lot of small shops.

Lake Hawea was next on the drive, and I got some great pictures here - rugged mountains surround it and the light was pretty decent.

The drive then took me through Mount Aspiring National Park, which has lots of amazing bridges and waterfalls and powerful rivers rushing through it. At the end of the park, I reached Haast, which is where I got my first land based view of the ocean since I had been in New Zealand.

The drive took about 5 hours, but I eventually made it to Fox Glacier, which comes down into a lush temperate rain forest. I did a little hike through this forest, and it ended with a long and thin suspension bridge over a river with a view of the glacier (although the glacier has receded quite a bit since when the bridge was built, so it was quite far away).

After that, I drove right up to the glacier and did a bit of a hike to the terminal face of it. This was the first time that I had seen a "real" glacier that you could tell was flowing like a river - definitely felt different then the glaciers on top of mountains.

I didn't have any gear, so I wasn't able to get onto it.

Next, I moved on to Franz Joseph Glacier, where I took a quick look at it from a pretty big distance and then left because it was rainy and getting dark.

I checked into a backpacker's at the town of Franz Joseph, where I made a few friends and had a few beers, and settled on doing a guided day hike on the Franz Joseph the next day.

I got up pretty early, and went down to the booking office to hopefully get a place for me and the guy I met, and luckily we were able to get a spot (turns out this actually fills up - even when it was going to be bad weather that day).

We were provided rain gear and crampons, and then took a bus out to the Glacier.  Once we got to the ice, things got pretty interesting. It was amazing up there! It was raining, so the sides of the canyons were EXTRA full of huge waterfalls coming down. Literally hundreds of falls were dropping the 600 feet to the bottom, and this seems really weird when you are on this big thing of crazy ice.

I didn't bring my camera (thank god), so I don't have any photos from up there, but it felt like Superman's ice fortress or something. I'd like to go again with better weather for photos.

Once we all got back, I threw my stuff in the car and headed home. On the way I back, I stopped at Bruce Bay and took the time to get out and touch the water (just to make it official!)

The drive home was just as scenic, and on arrive in Queenstown I quickly went to bed.