Day 8

We awoke in the morning to thankfully find that our ditch wasn’t a pond or mud pit like we’d feared. We made some breakfast of fried Banana Bread and yogurt, and discovered that Aundra’s milk had soured when it splashed out in chunks into her tea. So we set out to find a café to get her some new tea. Serendipitously, our next item to see was the Pancake Rocks, which as almost everything that was worth seeing in NZ had a gift shop and cafe attached. That’s hyperbole to be sure, but anything that was anything was fully formed for tourists. Not unique at all, but worth pointing out. It’s the flipside to having the useful iSites everywhere. Anyway, with a warm Chai Latte in hand, we braved the pouring rain for the short walk to the Pancake Rocks. 

Aptly named, these amazing sedimentary rock formations indeed looked like tall towers of stacked pancakes, and when set next to the ocean bursting waves out of the blow holes, it created quite an otherworldly experience.

Next, we finally were passing through a town with a Warehouse with time to spare, so we stopped in Greymouth to see if we could track down a useful watch, once an for all. What we discovered about The Warehouse, unlike Walmart, is that all of their clothes are made in NZ. It was a nice little piece of mind as we walked though an overwhelmingly laid out store. Our eyes didn’t know where to look first. But we found an awesome digital Timex for $20NZ! With another brief provisioning at the neighboring grocery store, we were off to see a glacier.

The Franz Joseph Glacier is not far from the coast, and the hike starts in a rainforest valley, which broadens to two distinctly different rivers. One of crystal clear water flowing out of the mountains from waterfalls of either side. The other a milky blue opaque, mineral filled water that is as cold as sin, flowing from the glacier.

 It was about a two kilometer hike to get a glance of the glacier itself, which has receded hundreds of meters in the last decade. 

It was a beautiful sight, as the rain clouds hung over the valley, the snowcapped mountains mingled with the white clouds and blue-white ice, flanked on all sides by the lush green rainforests. 

After some conversation with a couple of Aussie retirees, we headed back to town, where we found a nice hotel and rv park to spend the night with the rest of the glacier tourists, and their helicopter pilots.