Just some random photos while I finish off the rest of the day. After our multiple hikes we headed back to the hotel and inexplicably decided to eat at the hotel. The place was actually decently designed, lots of blonde woods to give it a ski lodge kind of look, but the customers were ancient. In contrast, all the waiters appeared to be about seven and seemed to have all started work today. our waiter, Kyle, was particularly terrible. He wrote everything we said down in painfully slow handwriting as he sounded out each letter he was writing under his breath, then proceeded to bring us food that bore no resemblance to our order. The one thing he was very good at though was wine. We ordered a bottle for dinner, and surprisingly he brought the right one. But he ruined that by stopping by on three separate times during dinner asking if we'd like him to bring a "few more bottles"? If we took him up on each offer, we'd have drunk at least a dozen bottles, which seemed excessive.

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.

Here's the landing part of the 30 minute excursion. To fill up space, you may be interested to know why the New Zealanders named their glacier after an Austrian emperor? So am I. Also filling up space, I didn't rate the hotel, I'm too lazy to write the whole name out again, but it's overall (1), Room-1, Facilities-1, Service-1.

We dumped our stuff in our spacious but ugly room and walked around the little town. The whole point of the town is to see the glacier at the town's edge, but it was all fogged in so it was hard to see. We tentatively arranged a helicopter trip for tomorrow morning, weather permitting, and went for a filling dinner at a cute cafe, the Blue Ice, before calling it a night. Here you have the main street of the town, and through the miracle of time travel, also an aerial view of the town, even though that wasn't taken until tomorrow.