The Glacier

You have never seen a one street town until you have been to Franz Josef, NZ. Everything you need for your glacier adventure and the day after is conveniently located on one of the town’s two main roads. We arrived just after 5pm on Friday April 29, parked the campervan, and took a look around the street. There was really nothing to do, but we booked out glacier adventure for the following day and decided that after the long 6-hour journey from Arrowtown it was time for dinner. We cooked up our pasta, made a salad, and shoveled it down in less than half an hours time. Why, you ask? Well, doesn’t thedate April 29, 2011 sound familiar? It was the night of the royal wedding! After dinner, we put on some nice looking clothes and went to the bar that is connected to our camper park; apparently they were having a “party” for the wedding. It turns out that AJ Hackett Bungy (yes, the same company Brittany used) was in town and giving away prizes at the same bar we were at. The competition was a “horizontal bungy” which meant that one player of the team had to run to one end of the bar while attached to a bungy, grab a cup of beer, and return it to their teammate. The otherteammate had to chug the beer down as fast as they could and who ever could do it fastest would win a free bungy anda free bungy swing. None of us competed, so none of us won; not that it would matter though because the bungy was in Queenstown and we were not looking to go back there during this holiday in New Zealand. After we swooned over Prince William and Prince Harry some more and commented on how beautiful Kate looked with some girls from London, we headed back to the RV for the night; we had a long day ahead of us tomorrow.The alarm went off at 7:30am the following day to all of us groaning and hitting snooze at least twice. At 9 o’clock we wandered over to the glacier guide base and awaited further instructions. We wrote down emergency contact info, I got a look over by two people and a lesson on how to maintain my diabetes while on the glacier, and then we gathered our equipment and headed for the bus. The boots they gave us were at least three times heavier than the sneakers we had previously been wearing and it was clear after walking ten yards that the hike up the glacier in these was not going to be easy. Once we arrived it was about a 3km (a little more than 2 miles) walk from the bus to the base of the glacier, but still there was no sign of ice, it was all just a bunch of rocks. Our guide informed us that this was because the ice was underneath. He explained all about high and low pressure systems, tectonic plates, and why the rock was on top of the ice at the bottom of the glacier- basically, it had been on the bottom, but due to an explosion of underneath because of the pressure, it was now backwards with the ice being on bottom. Finally, we strapped into our crampons andstarted maneuvering all over the glacier. We used pick axes to balance ourselves and our guide would strike the ice to make stairs for us to walk down. Throughout the day, my group had 3 guides, which was very unusual. The first guide accidentally picked his leg so hard in the shin that he had to be taken away by helicopter, the second guide led us the rest of the way up and down, but had to make a speedy exit at the end because he still had six hours of driving ahead of him. The last guide didn’t take us far, just from the bottom of the glacier tot the bus, but he was the cutest so I didn’t care. It’s hard for me to put into words exactly what we were experiencing so I tried to take as much video as possible. The glacier hike was one of the most adventurous, exciting, and interesting activities I’ve ever done in my life and I would recommend it to anyone no matter what part of the world you are in. We had planned on going to the glacier thermal pools after the hike, but we were exhausted and starving so we decided to just go back to the camper, shower, and go out for our last dinner of the holiday.

Before I came to New Zealand, I wasn’t too excited about it. Don’t get me wrong, I was excited to go to a new country and get another stamp in my passport, but something about it just wasn’t screaming “fun holiday!” to me. I did really want to go to the outback and hopefully some day I will, but for right now I think I made the right choice. Driving in an RV with four good friends, experiencing an aftershock, almost freezing to death in Queenstown after almost eating myself into a coma with Ferg Burger, and finally seeing just how much a small town has to offer were some of the highlights not only of my week in NZ, but probably of my entire semester abroad. For those of you wondering where my other friends Julia and Cathy are (the girls who went on the Springbrook tour with me and Jenna), well since they are in a different program for studying abroad, they had the option to go to Thailand for break and they decided to do it. It’s been pretty strange not talking to them for over a week now, but I’m sure they had a lot of fun. I’m excited to see them again tomorrow and hear all about Thailand and the amazing experiences it offered them.