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This place seemed like a little Austrian ski resort. Franz Josef relies solely on tourists, and although it's a 10/15minute ride to the glacier, you can see the top of it from almost anywhere in the little village/town.
It's quite surreal that for days we pass all this green scenery on the south Island, and then just in this little town is a 'lump of ice'. I'm good with the technical terms of all this glacier stuff as you can see.
Pictures are the best way to describe the Franz Josef glacier, because words don't really do it justice to be honest, so feel free to look at my pictures on facebook etc.
A brief few words of what I did on the full day hike tour then.............We were split into 4 groups and I was in the first group which was meant to be the 'quick group', and because we had to stay ahead of everyone else, we were supposedly limited to taking pictures. Tell that to the Chinese lad who I think wanted to be an interior designer of an Ice cave thing. I think he wore the battery out on the camera within 5 minutes. I was only going to walk on the Worlds famous Franz Josef glacier once, so I was going to make sure I wasn't sold short on the amount of pictures I could take. Due to me having long legs, it was easy to catch up anyway. We had the pleasure of some posh old fool who made sure he told everyone where he had been climbing in the world. I said to my friend how I would just love it if he fell, and thankfully it all went to script. We had to wait for him to get his cut leg patched up (I didn't actually wish injury on him), but our group one soon became group 2. We had lunch near the top of the glacier and as usual, I managed to get a 5 minute power nap in.....STANDARD.
It was well worth the money and the time doing the full day hike up the Franz Josef glacier, because it's not everyday you can say you did that (not if you've lived in England all your life anyway). I can understand why some of the Swiss girls on our bus didn't bother though, due to them seeing that sort of thing fairly often I presume.
Next blog will be about the Fox Glacier, which some say is the brother/sister glacier to Franz Josef.
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