Hello family. Kailee said I had to contribute to some of the blog so I decided to write about my favorite part of the trip! Here we go...
So climbing a glacier was something I really wanted to do. I have been training at the gym for 3 weeks prior to make sure my climb was a success!! (just kidding, but seriously:)) My workout plan will be included in a different blog so that you all can use it haha! So there was two glaciers in the south island worth climbing, Franz Josef and Fox glaciers. The Franz Josef is much more popular, but I went with the Fox Glacier tour because only this tour group had access to climb the actual face of the glacier making it completely untainted by tourist (it was also like $10 cheaper which was a plus). So story of our trip was that it was rainy whenever we wanted to do an outdoor activity, and this day was no different. The weather did get better as our hike went on which made us extremely excited. Our tour guides name was Passang, originally from Nepal, and he had a heavy Filipino sounding accent that kept me entertained for most of the journey. Before we began, we had to get equipment, including a rain coat, gloves, crampons (the spiky things for shoes), steel toe boots, a beanie, and my favorite...WATER! We then made our way by bus to the glacier itself. When first looking at the glacier I didn't think we were gonna make it! The thick, gray clouds covered the valley and it was gonna be a very far hike. We first had to bush walk (bush = forest) up about 800 stairs to the spot where we would start walking up the glacier. Passang was good about letting us rest, so we would walk and stop about every 15 mins for a quick water. Some parts were pretty scary, going up on the sides of cliffs and only holding onto a chain which they nailed into the mountainside, but he was very aware of the safety precautions and made us very aware as well. When we finally got up to the clearing to start our glacier walk, the view was incredible. I felt so accomplished to be up there. A glacier is such a natural wonder, and how many people do you know that can actually say "I climbed a glacier"? We tied on our crampons to our boots and made our way onto the ice! It was amazing, the company cut out "ice stairs" with a pick that made it a little easier. Still it was pretty slippery, and Passang made sure we were super careful. We got to see Ice caves, and drank pure water from the glacier runoff. It was my favorite experience of the entire trip! We walked back down a different trail on the side of the glacier, and got to see its actual mass! After a 5 hour hike we were pretty tired, but the experience was totally worth every penny!
The next day we visited this place called the Blue Pools in Haast. The Blue Pools were a 20 minute hike off the side of the motorway (motorway = highway) in the middle of a gigantic national park. That was a short hike for us now. It was very cool and very BLUE. The title did not disappoint! The blueness is caused by snow runoff from the mountains. It was a very worthwhile little trip, and I made the most tranquil little stone stack. (it definitely was the nicest one there haha, maybe kailee will put up the picture) Than we had to drive another few hours, so we made ham sandwiches (that was all that we ate on our trip) and hit the road.
We finally arrived at Stuart Landsborough's Puzzling World in Wanaka. It was soooo trippy. This guy had to be a real puzzle genius to put together this entire museum of puzzles. There was many deceiving pictures that we took and we still can't figure out how he did it. I hope you guys can see all the pictures from this place. Built around his museum is a maze that takes on average an hour and a half. It took us longer than that I think haha. But it was very fun. Basically you had to find all four corners and the way out. The way out took us the longest and we were getting pretty frustrated by the end. After completion we had fun looking at all the quirky gifts at the gift shop and settled on buying this hologram bookmark of these giraffes. Its hilarious. That's all for me folks. Hope you enjoyed it.
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