Day Nine - Greymouth / Hokatika / Glaciers / Wanaka

December 19th, Sunday

Wow, what an amazing day we had today!! This morning we left Greymouth and stopped in Hokatika, which is where they hold the annual "Wild Food Festival", which is the time of year that people drive to this town to eat really weird things, such as Huhu grubs - voluntarily. Oh yes, they also have a great variety of beers served. I'm sure the overconsumption of the latter aids in the eating of the former. Well anyway, that's held in April, so we missed it (phew). So we ate breakfast there in Hokatika - a delicious stack of pancakes with maple syrup, and a cup of hot black currant juice which has to be the most staining substance on the face of the earth which I know because I of course managed to spill it on my tan pants. I got it out though, mostly. So after Hokatika we stopped off at Franz Joseph Glacier, and got the opportunity to hike right down to the foot of it. Since we didn't hire a guide, and are definitely not considered "experienced" climbers, we didn't climb up on to the glacier, but it was amazing enough to just be able to look up at it. It was the first time that I have seen enough ice together to know that it really is blue!! It was beautiful. We definitely had some pretty amazing photo ops.

So after we hiked to the Franz Joseph Glacier it was back on the road for us, and we stopped off to take a few more pictures of the next glacier we came across - Fox Glacier - this time from the road.

So we continued from there on our journey on to Wanaka, where we were staying for a couple of days. We arrived in Wanaka at around 8:30 PM, but since the sun doesn't set to almost 10 PM, we had almost a couple full more hours of daylight left. So after checking into our GREAT motel room (I should really say house, because it has a garage, two bedrooms, two full bathrooms, a huge living area, a dining room, and a full kitchen, with a view of the Lake!) we headed off for dinner in downtown Wanaka. Wanaka is this amazing small town, absolutely beautiful, and Shania Twain has bought property down here, and it's no wonder why. It's a town set around a huge lake, which is flanked by the snow capped southern alps, so it really is picturesque - although all of New Zealand is really. So we had some really good Indian food for dinner (getting addicted to curry, in New Zealand of all places), and that was about the extent of our adventures for the day. Looking forward to a full day of relaxing tomorrow!!