Franz Josef Glacier and rainforests

It was quite a short drive to the Franz Josef Glacier. Since we had so much washing to do, we stayed at the local Top 10 caravan park, which is a very new and clean park (it will be even better given 5 more years to grow trees for shade).

The glacier seems to pour through the valley above us, like dirty cream. Although it is quite white at the top where the snow falls (it is called the Neve I think), it is not so lower down. We will walk around the edges tomorrow, but will save our (expensive) guided glacier walk for the Fox Glacier on Mon. or Tues., as its slope is less severe than Franz.

Weather is very bright and sunny, even though the mountains have a top-hat of white cloud just hanging there. The skies are full of buzzing helicopters and light planes taking tourists for the trip overhead. They cost between $200 and $400 per person for up to 30 minutes of flight. We've decided that we'd rather walk and save the money for the Doubtful Sound overnight cruise that so many people from all different backgrounds have raved about.

Kura had a headache and went to sit in the TV room for a rest. What should be on, Bethany, but Gilmore Girls. I swear I cannot escape these crazy, fast-talking women - even in NZ they follow me!

When Kura felt better, we drove to the Glacier car park and went on an hour's walk through the rainforest in the valley below it. Although we've taken photos of the glacier, you really cannot do justice to the size. It is somehow odd that in the presence of so much cold, you can have rain forest, which I usually associate with Queensland. The nice part about these rain forests is that there are no leeches...unlike Queensland!

It's been quite frustrating not being able to access GSM mobile phone services for about 3 days. The GSM service is the carrier for our mobile phone calls and GPRS-over-GSM is the carrier via Ian's PDA for email, blogging, and occasionally web browsing (seldom though as it can be very expensive via GSM). This afternoon, I gave up waiting for "the next town" and used the caravan park web kiosk at $9/hour to email Jodi to say where we were. But in the middle of my internet session, the power failed and the computers wouldn't come up, so the park staff had to come and reset things for us, and give us more money to reimburse us.

When I came back to the van I noticed that Vodafone's signal strength had gone from zero to two points. Makes me suspect that their tower had a problem that was only addressed when the power failure occurred.....! Hence the multiple, backdated blog postings and delayed emails that have poured from my PDA this afternoon.

We had hoped to join the Presbyterian church in Franz tomorrow, but there are no services on.