We got up early Saturday, checked out and retraced our drive to Fox Glacier, stopped for breakfast then drove for about six hours through what I think was the nicest scenery of the trip. We drove along the West Coast between mountains and the ocean, then turned inland, driving alongside beautiful green-blue lakes hemmed in by mountains.The weather was perfect and quite warm, and allowed for perfect mountain reflections in the lake.

After our picnic we did another hike, this time around Lake Matheson, which was supposed to give great views of Mt. Cook. But the mountain was fogged in, so the views were disappointing and the trail pretty boring. A total non-sequitir, but when I was a kid, for several years I used to have the same nightmare again and again. It involved a bunch of pirates, who were sailing very fast in a bathtub past a bunch of lines, like a bar code scanner. Most of them were skinny lines, but about every twentieth line was fat, and whenever they passed that, a creepy voice would call out, very slowly and deeply, the word picnic. I was creeped out by that word for most of my life for no reason at all, sort of like my puppet phobia. So I'm happy to report that my repeated typing of the word picnic is having no impact on my whatsoever.

Just some more photos of Fox Glacier. I've run out of words, but since it was such an effort to get up here, it seems like I should show a disproportionate number of photos.

We had a good breakfast at a local cafe and bought some sandwiches for a picnic lunch, then headed out for a bit of hiking to the glacier. The hike took about 3 hours through some beautiful mountain scenery and glacier views, although the trail was quite steep. Actually the hardest part came at a river crossing, where the trail ends on one bank and resumes across the quite deep and freezing cold river. The only other people we saw the whole time were two strange women who were dressed like they were going to the disco, tight jeans and ultra high heels. Actually they looked like hookers, but if they were they picked a really bad area to ply their trade in. Anyway, I have no idea how they climbed the trail in those outfits, but they didn't seem to think anything was out of the ordinary.

You probably noticed that during the last post I started to diverge from the journal script, since the journal didn't say things like to fill up space in this entry. I'm not sure, but I'm getting bored writing and reading the journal entries. I'm not sure if it's just that New Zealand, for all its scenic beauty, doesn't have a lot of material for funny cultural and historical stories like Asia or Europe, or if it's just moving too slowly because I have a lot more material to cover, but it feels like this section is dragging. I'll still stick mostly to the journal at least for the next couple of trips and see how things pan out in different locations, then adjust the writing style as needed. Back to the plodding journal...It was about 8 am when the helicopter landed, and since we still had the whole day ahead of us when we landed, we decided to drive 20 km to the next town over, Fox Glacier. The guidebooks all say it's a tossup between the two as to where to base yourself for glacier exploration, but don't be fooled, Fox Glacier is much better. It's smaller, there didn't seem to be any tour groups, and the people were much, much younger. It's also quainter and the Fox Glacier Hotel looked like the Ritz compared to the dump in Franz Josef.

We awoke Friday to the buzz of helicopters, as it seems the whole town takes to the air every morning. The weather was perfect so we headed across the street and were tightly bundled into a chopper with an old boring couple, then took off to see both the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers, as well as Mt. Cook, with a quick stop at the Fox Glacier for a cheesy photo opportunity with the pilot's polaroid. The views were spectacular, as was the experience of flying between the mountains, but the stop was a bit dull, as you're on the top of the mountain and all you can see is a flat, white surface.