headed off for a drink with them to the campsite’s bar. The bar was really full and there seemed to be some sort of karaoke going on so we didn’t stay long, we headed off the phone box to catch up with a few phone calls.

We woke up quite late and decided that we would stay for another day. The weather was looking better so we decided to head up to the glacier and do one of the many glacier walks. There was a great walk which went right up to the base of the glacier and right through the old glacier valley. We managed to get really close to the bottom but there are signs to advise you not to go too close to the bottom due to huge hunks of ice breaking of it at random moments. The size and thickness of the ice is incredible and we stood in awe of this mighty sight in front of us for quite some time before heading back down the valley and checking out the viewpoint. Again the glacier looked

superb from a distance and reading the information boards we realised that where we were stood would have been under 500 metres of ice in the 1800’s!!! It is incredible to see how much the glacier has retreated, it really is interesting stuff reading about the geology of the New Zealand.

We had a very chilled evening and decided we would get up nice and early and head over to Fox Glacier the next morning. Wow, we even amazed ourselves as we were up, had breakfast, a shower and were out of the campsite before 10 a.m. - pretty impressive eh? The weather was Ok but not exactly cracking the flags but as we drove through the valley the sun started to shine and it slowly started to warm up! By the time we got to Fox Glacier it was brilliant weather so the first thing we did was park up and head straight for the heli-hike shop! There were places left for the afternoons heli-hike and we made our minds up