Sunday, March 13, 2005
Get Your Crampon
Yesterday we took a guided tour of the Franz Josef Glacier. The Franz Josef Glacier is one of only a few in the world that empty into a subtropical rain forest. It is not permitted to go to the glacier by yourself, since it is advancing at the rate of a meter a day which is a lot of ice falling onto tourists if they allowed you there. Early every morning the professional glacier people go up and hack out a trail for the day. The tourists get on a bus at 8 AM. We walked up the glacier valley from the parking lot about 2 kilometers, up a big moraine, strapped crampons onto our boots, and then walked on the ice for a couple hours. The ice is a beautiful blue color, and it was actually quite easy walking on it as long as you were careful not to step into crevasses 130 meters deep. A big chunk of ice fell off right next to the guide. He said, "I didn't plan that actually." We met a nice young guy from Amsterdam who hung out with us for the rest of the day. Christoph is studying to be a lawyer so he won't be nice for long.
Tony, our glacier guide, said that he had in the past couple of years occasionally been hired to run tours for Lord of the Ring aficionados. "I'd show themn the place where Peter Jackson had stood framing some particular shot and they'd ---" [pantomimes frantic camera clicking --- New Zealanders don't appear to say "be all" in the California sense but this is a place where the idiom is called for]
All of New Zealand has been just gorgeous. Driving across the island to the Wild Foods Festival was gorgeous, but we were in a hurry and didn't want to stop -- it was kind of like the Road to Gerlach with a long line of cars in a vaguely deserty landscape and policemen checking to see that nobody was prematurely drunk or speeding.
Driving down from Franz Josef to Te Anau today was just gorgeous, with a huge range of different landscapes -- rain forest in front of snow capped peaks, gorges, bare mountains next to big lakes, brown hills like California, and even a little bit of miscellaneous flat farmland.
Leaving breakfast this morning we picked up a hitchhiker named Emma from Somerset who tolerated well the 40 km or so that we drove into Haast Junction with the gas tank empty warning light on. We had intended to buy gas in Fox Glacier but in the fuss of picking up a hitchhiker we forgot. It was also forgotten to take a picture of a sign referring to MINNEHAHA something or other which, if anybody from Minnesota is reading this, knows that this is not, strictly speaking, a Maori expression, and when I am on a cheaper internet connection I am going to look up to see how come that name got associated with any features in Fox Glacier, Westland, New Zealand.
Anyway the car was conservative in its estimate and apparently had ten liters left.
We dropped Emma off at Wanaka in front of a Kashmiri restaurant. The duty officer at the restaurant had a tshirt on that said
GEORGE BUSH AND SONS
FAMILY BUTCHERS
SINCE 1989
Ashraf (that was his name) asked where I was from and I said "California". I sent Dave to go get the camera from the car but before he got back Ashraf changed his shirt. I think he doesn't understand the detailed political geography of America.
Tony, our glacier guide, said that he had in the past couple of years occasionally been hired to run tours for Lord of the Ring aficionados. "I'd show themn the place where Peter Jackson had stood framing some particular shot and they'd ---" [pantomimes frantic camera clicking --- New Zealanders don't appear to say "be all" in the California sense but this is a place where the idiom is called for]
All of New Zealand has been just gorgeous. Driving across the island to the Wild Foods Festival was gorgeous, but we were in a hurry and didn't want to stop -- it was kind of like the Road to Gerlach with a long line of cars in a vaguely deserty landscape and policemen checking to see that nobody was prematurely drunk or speeding.
Driving down from Franz Josef to Te Anau today was just gorgeous, with a huge range of different landscapes -- rain forest in front of snow capped peaks, gorges, bare mountains next to big lakes, brown hills like California, and even a little bit of miscellaneous flat farmland.
Leaving breakfast this morning we picked up a hitchhiker named Emma from Somerset who tolerated well the 40 km or so that we drove into Haast Junction with the gas tank empty warning light on. We had intended to buy gas in Fox Glacier but in the fuss of picking up a hitchhiker we forgot. It was also forgotten to take a picture of a sign referring to MINNEHAHA something or other which, if anybody from Minnesota is reading this, knows that this is not, strictly speaking, a Maori expression, and when I am on a cheaper internet connection I am going to look up to see how come that name got associated with any features in Fox Glacier, Westland, New Zealand.
Anyway the car was conservative in its estimate and apparently had ten liters left.
We dropped Emma off at Wanaka in front of a Kashmiri restaurant. The duty officer at the restaurant had a tshirt on that said
GEORGE BUSH AND SONS
FAMILY BUTCHERS
SINCE 1989
Ashraf (that was his name) asked where I was from and I said "California". I sent Dave to go get the camera from the car but before he got back Ashraf changed his shirt. I think he doesn't understand the detailed political geography of America.
