Dead Possums and Pancake Rocks

We had a nice early start from Franz Josef and a long day of travel ahead of us – almost ten hours on the road! Although, as mentioned before, the bus rides were not so bad as the drivers tended to treat it as more of a tour than a bus ride so we had plenty of commentary on our way towards Nelson where we’d be spending our penultimate night in New Zealand.

We drove North through the Glacier National Park and after an hour and a half or so we stopped at a place called “Bushman’s Café”, an interesting place that had a ten foot model of a fly on its front wall. This was one of our lunch stops so Nic and I had some lunch before walking into the café (we made sandwiches for the journey). Inside everything was a bit…creepy, and…stuffed. Almost everything was made out of something that had once lived (and I don’t include trees in that by the way). The chairs were made of antlers and on top were cushions of fur. Almost all of the souvenirs were possum related i.e. possum fur hat, possum fur gloves, dead stuffed possum and so on. The bushman who owned the café seemed to have reluctantly entered the business world as all his signs were written by a bitter hand towards tourists and, well, everyone who didn’t kill possums. In New Zealand they have a problem with possums, and you can get a job as a possum hunter if you are so inclined. Although, from the evidence of the Bushman’s Café I’d say such a profession would have a markedly negative impact on your sanity. There was a museum at the back of the café which I can only assume was a macabre sideshow filled with a multitude of skeletons and badly stuffed animals, quite the setting for a low budget horror movie which neither Nicola nor I wanted to be part of. 


After leaving the Bushman’s Café behind us we continued on our journey until a few hours later we reached a place called Punakaiki; home to the Pancake Rocks. We had considered staying in Punakaiki when we were planning our journey around New Zealand but we were glad we didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, the pancake rocks were quite a sight but we managed to see it all within the 20 minute break we had on the bus. With the precious little time we had in New Zealand I think Nicola and I would have been disappointed had we stopped for the night. The path to the pancake rocks takes you through what looks like some sort of corn fields (although they’re not actually corn it just looks like that sort of flora). As you head towards the sea you get an image of a series of rocks, flattened at the heads and seamed with a number of eroded lines throughout. They were pretty interesting looking, and the area was nice and certainly a nice stop off on our bus journey, but not worth staying a night unless you were in New Zealand for a few weeks and had some time to kill.

After getting back on the coach we travelled on to Nelson, a large port town, where we would spend our final nights in a hostel (which we were relieved at the thought of) before heading on to Wellington and finally Auckland (which would be another mammoth day of travel ahead of us).

Glow Worm Cave

We woke up on our final day in Franz Josef wondering what to do, initially we fancied walking to the lakes but decided not to after discovering how far away they were. We thought they were nearby but it turned out that the map we were given was correct in saying “not to scale” although perhaps it should have said “woefully out of scale” as the lakes were 10km away and not just down the road as they appeared on the map. As we were talking to the girl in reception she suggested going to Tatare Cave, the walk to the entrance of the walkway was a ten minute walk from the hostel, as there were glow worms in the cave. We thought why not? Nothing else to be done that day after our lake plan went up in smoke.

After packing some sandwiches we left the hostel and walked down the road passed a pub called the Alice May and turned up a lane past a few houses and onto the walking path to Tatare Caves. We had a shaded walk underneath a canopy of trees and up a reasonably steep path to the cave entrance. We had brought a torch as we were told it would be dark – the receptionist did say we could just feel our way down through the darkness with our hands on the walls but that sounded like a terrible idea. 

A small stream ranging from an inch deep to over ankle deep ran the entire way through the path of the cave, which was quite narrow; I did not need to duck but if I jumped I would have cracked my skull open (especially if I had been feeling my way through the darkness with my hands along the wall) and I could place my hands on both walls when standing in the centre of the path. We walked for around 200 metres, passing some Department of Conservation workers who had been doing something in the caves, but saw no sign of the glow worms. We stopped after a while as our feet were soaking and starting to get cold, it was only after stopping that Nicola noticed the glow worms around us. They were tiny, like little stars on a wide night sky. There were quite a few of them though, and as we walked back through the cave we stopped at regular intervals to see more of them. We had not seen glow worms before so we thought they were quite cool, but I must admit I thought they would be the size of earth worms just glowing so I was a little disappointed that they were tiny fellas. After leaving the cave we squelched our way back to the hostel to dry off and enjoy the rest of our final day in Franz Josef in the sunshine. 

  

 

Franz Josef…not to be confused with Franz Ferdinand

We rose early once again, packed our bags and checked out of another hostel and boarded yet another bus to get us to our next destination. This time we were headed north (as opposed to east when we went to Milford Sound) towards Franz Josef in the Glacier National Park. The bus ride commenced at 08:00 and we arrived at around 16:30, so another long day on the road but we had regular stops for photos (including Thunder Creek Falls, and a Salmon Farm) along the way and the bus was pretty comfortable (InterCity bus lines are the firm, they are really good). As is custom with InterCity, the driver gave us a bit of a commentary of the areas we were driving through which made the drive more interesting and pleasant.

We checked into our hostel and had a quiet evening as we planned to have a walk to Franz Josef Glacier in the morning. Franz Josef was originally called Victoria Glacier (after Queen Victoria) but for some unexplained reason someone let it be renamed after Franz Josef, the then Austro-Hungarian Emperor. Franz Josef town sits around 10km from Franz Josef Glacier terminal (foot of the glacier so to speak) and is a quiet little place with a few hostels, cafes and bars. On our way here we drove past Fox Glacier (presumably where they grow and harvest Fox Glacier Mints…), which used to be called Albert Glacier after Prince Albert (Queen Victoria’s husband? Son? I can’t remember) but was renamed after the first Premier of New Zealand, which back to the point is a similar little town nestled beneath Fox Glacier in the valley on the other side of Franz Josef. They offer helicopter rides on to the glaciers but they cost a fortune so we passed up the option.

The following day we booked a shuttle to the glacier car park (only 5k from the town but we didn’t want to unnecessarily add 10km to our walk) and headed towards the Franz Josef Glacier. Our driver stopped us partway and pointed out where the glacier currently is, and where it used to be. She said last year it receded half a km back and shrunk down 70 metres, quite some distance. In the last 250 years the glacier has receded 10km. Surely visiting these glaciers, and witnessing first hand their rapid melting, should be enough to turn the minds of any remaining climate change sceptics. In twenty years the Franz Josef Glacier will be no more (at the current rate of melting), a very sad thought for a Glacier that (looking at it even now, and more so from pictures from the 1870s) was once so large, rugged and beautiful. Even from last year the glacier has visibly reduced in size (we were told) and it’s hard to imagine that if we were here one year ago it would have been even more impressive.

The walk to the glacier – or as far as you are allowed to go, for they can be dangerous things what with falling rocks and slippery, sliding ice and that – took us around an hour. It was a flat, pleasant walk across shallow streams and shingle rock. The views were lovely and we took plenty of pictures.

      

We walked back and as we had around two hours until our pick up we walked along another path past Peter’s Pool – named after the brave, intrepid (nine year old) explorer who apparently named it after himself after camping the night there on his own in 1890 – which serves to reflect the image of the Glacier upon its surface, however, due to the receding glacier less is reflected upon the pool these days. After Peter’s Pool we walked on Douglas Path (not sure who that’s named after, Dudley Moore maybe?) which was hilly and largely just a forest path with no real standout features. We walked back across a cycle track which was nice and flat (we didn’t want to tackle the Douglas Path hills again) and waited in the car park for our shuttle whilst admiring the view of Franz Josef in the background.

Milford (Haven) Sound

We woke nice and early for our trip to Milford Sound which was due to depart at 07:10, after an eventful night in our dorm. An English guy came back roaring drunk, aggressive and was shouting and swearing during the night; he was punching and kicking his bed shouting at his female friend “don’t tell me to hush I’ll kick your f***ing head in” – shameful behaviour, especially considering it was partly directed towards a woman whilst the rest was incoherent gibberish. We left a note at reception (it was not yet open) asking to be moved rooms as we did not feel comfortable staying in a room with such a disgraceful human being. Unpleasantness aside, we boarded a coach with a glass roof and ample leg room for our 300km drive to Milford Sound. We did not really appreciate the length of the day ahead of us until we double checked our itinerary the night before the trip, but as our bus driver told us “it’s not all about the destination with this trip, it’s about the journey”; and he was right.

We drove along a (long and) winding road that ran beside a huge lake (the longest in New Zealand), up through mountainous passes, and down through rolling hills; a beautiful drive. We stopped after two hours at Te Anau (say tea-an-ee-ow), a lovely little town upon a lake, before continuing our drive on to Milford Sound. By the time we reached Te Anau we had driven approximately 120km so we were slowly making ground.

Two more hours passed, we had a lunch break, and we were entering the Fjordland National Park; a National Park boasting fourteen fjords and numerous mountains and waterfalls – a UNESCO World Heritage site and it was easy to see why. We stopped for numerous photo breaks and in total the drive there was wonderful, and we saw so many sights including these mischievous Mountain Keas – mountain parrots – who loved having their pictures taken and generally being centre of attention. We passed through the Homer Tunnel and the surrounding area, which is always in danger of landslides and avalanches and we made it to Milford at just gone 13:00. Despite the drive being six hours or so it passed by surprisingly quickly.

When we arrived at Milford Sound we boarded a catamaran called Pride of Milford and spent the next hour and a half on a cruise through the Milford Sound. We learned the difference between a Sound and a Fjord; a Sound is a flooded river valley and a Fjord is a flooded glacier valley (something like that anyway). The cruise was lovely, the mountains carved by the movements of glaciers (it should be called Milford Fjord apparently) towered over us and made for impressive sights and we also saw two colonies of fur seals along the way. Milford Sound was actually discovered by a Welshman named John Gronow who was seal hunting and happened to come across the inlet – there are two outcrops that run at 90 degree angles to each other which has the effect of making it look like a continuous wall of rock from the Tasman Sea, which old Gronow discovered otherwise. He named the place Milford Haven at first, but this was later changed to Milford Sound in keeping with the other thirteen sounds that were in the area (one being the Doubtful Sound, an uninspiring name if ever I heard one). We took some great pictures of the waterfalls and I narrowly avoided being soaked as the boat sailed underneath one – Nicola said I scampered away. The winds were strong and as we reached the entrance to the Tasman Sea the swells became quite large, rocking the boat back and forth making it difficult to drink our complimentary tea and coffee. Throughout the cruise (and from when we entered the Fjordland National Park) the rain had been lashing down – the highest recorded rainfall in one day was over 500ml! We didn’t mind the rain though as it improved the waterfalls and added a little something to the overall atmosphere on board. The trip was one of our favourites (each new one seems to be better than the last) and we loved the day despite it being long. We would heartily recommend it to anyone if they are to be in the area.

The journey back was less eventful, less picture stops and more driving, and we were back by 19:20. There was a note waiting for us at reception – we couldn’t be moved rooms as the hostel was fully booked. We were in our room and we saw a lad lying in the bunk where all the shouting and swearing had come from during the early hours, Nicola popped to the toilet and I thought I’d have a word with him and make him apologise to Nicola for how he acted…just as I started with “Excuse me, I want to have a word with you about your behaviour last night –“ he interrupted with “I only arrived today”, and true, we checked with reception; and his accent was also different – the boorish drunk had gone, we think he was a friend of someone and not a guest as reception said the only guy there last night was Felix and the drunken oaf was referred to as “Joe”. I made an apology to the guy, it was kind of awkward, but he was nice enough and understanding after I explained the circumstances, and Nicola and I at least felt more at ease in our room and prepared to have a final comfortable night in our most comfortable to date dorm room. We had another early (ish) start in the morning so we needed a good night’s sleep.