Ooh it was ever so long ago… But at least one reader has asked about what we got up to during our final few days in New Zealand. And as I write, it is New Year’s Eve (although this is going to get posted some time later), which seems like a good time to get rid of this blogging backlog.
So, after kayaking it was time to see some more of South Island. One thing New Zealand has that many other places don’t is glaciers that extend down to quite a low altitude. We went to have a look at a couple of these, which flow off Mount Cook.
The weather was pretty poor, and the cloud quite low. But we had our lunch, put our boots on, and set off… to find, a few hundred meters up the path, that the river was in flood and had blocked the path. Franz Josef Glacier was only partly visible through the clag and we were a bit disappointed not to have been able to get closer.
But never mind, this was to be a two glacier day, and only an hour down the road was Fox Glacier, which had obligingly not flooded the path. So we were able to get quite up close and personal, and have a good gawp. It was somewhat grubbier than Franz Josef Glacier, and again that tops were in cloud. But it was a sea-level glacier, with tiny little people wandering around on it, and some extremely vertical cliffs further down the valley, so it was generally quite cool.
Further south, it was time to have another attempt at seeing some glowworms underground. We’d previously queued up for a glowworm cave on North Island, waiting hopefully for the CO2 levels to drop far enough for groups to be allowed in. Which they didn’t 😦 But on South Island we got to see the genuine article.
These particular glowworms are only found in Australia and New Zealand, and have a pretty damn odd life-cycle. When they reach the lava stage they spend around nine months eating, which they do by dangling sticky ‘fishing lines’ down from the cave roof to catch insects. (They also eat their fellow glowworms if any are cheeky enough to set up their own lines too close to another worm’s). They then turn into flies, which have no mouths or digestive systems, and so live just long enough to reproduce.
Anyway, when they’re hungry, and when it’s quiet, glowworms glow (no, really?!). The light looked pale blue to our eyes, but other people report seeing green or white. Because they stop glowing if disturbed by noise or light, we took the boat ride in the dark and complete silence, with the guide pulling on chains attached to the wall to move the boat, (and thus avoiding the need for any sort of engine). It was quite a dream-like experience, with the lights of the glowworms as the only sensory input.
After this we still had time for one more glacier, although this one took a bit more effort to visit. The track to the car-park is strictly a fair weather job, as the fords become impassable in the wet. There’s then a 1km wander up the main river valley, followed by 3km of ascent up a side valley. This took us up to the Rob Roy Glacier, which was very pretty indeed. We heard the occasional rumble on the way up, as a chunk fell off, and also got to see this from the viewing point, making the whole sweaty climb more than worth while.
That was almost that for New Zealand, and the scenery got much less exciting as we drove up the east coast towards Christchurch. But there was one thing of note; the Moeraki boulders.
According to my fellow-blogger and Chief Geologist, these are calcareous concretions of unusually large size that have been exposed as the surrounding mudstone has been washed away – in other words the near-spherical shape is a product of their formation rather than erosion. Think of the way a pearl forms inside an oyster.
And that was the end of our travels in the southern hemisphere. We headed back to the UK, via a long weekend in China, for Xmas & New Year festivities, and will be on the look out for some decent snow from now on…
Different Days 