Day 12.

After a hard day hitching we slept in until the cleaners woke us up at 10.30. We really want to do a full day trip on the glacier as a half day is $80 and a full day is only $115, plus how many glaciers do you get the chance to walk on!? The glacier tours leave at 9 so we had missed that, but there were plenty of walks to do for free.

We had a game of giant chess in the garden which Duncan won (he is winning the chess series 5-1 at mo! Although I‘m 6-1 up on him at scissor, paper, stone - I‘d rather be lucky than skillful). Then we took a stroll to Lake Matherson with 2 guys in our room who turned out to be from Deal! The lake has good views of Mount Cook and the Fox Glacier…but the downside is this stroll turned out to be a 12km round trip (excluding the 1 ½ hours it took to walk around the lake!). I was shattered, but you can see from the pics that it was a nice place. The reflection of the mountains in the lake was a pretty impressive sight.

We went for a few beers after this but the bar was empty due to a 21st birthday in the town (it’s a tiny place). The barman offered to take us over to the party when the pub shut and me Duncan and a guy from our room agreed to go. Before we went we stopped at the barman’s place on the way for a few beers and were warned that the locals can be a bit hostile to outsiders and the guy whose birthday it was is a know psycho. Sounded fun. We were assured that he would go in to smooth things over first so no harm….or so we thought.

When we got to the party our barman insisted on hanging back while we went in first! He turned into the biggest wimp/turncoat I’ve ever met. Undeterred we marched in and the looks we got were pretty worrying. After about 15mins of glares a old boy came up to our roommate and said “why are you here?”…”the barman from the pub said we could come”……”bulls***, get out or I’ll throw you down the stairs!”.

I turned to the barman who was cowering away in the corner and asked whether the guy was just joking and he warned us that he is likely to make a big scene and the he definitely wasn’t joking! Our roommate said he’d go if there was a problem and hotfooted it back to the hostel. Me and Duncan weren’t directly threatened so we figured we’d stay a bit longer and see what happens. Eventually the evils got too annoying and we decided to leave anyway as nobody wanted us there.

Our roomate was making cheese on toast when we got back to the hostel and pretty pleased to see we survived. We joined in, had a few beers, and chatted about what absolute w**kers the locals were. Pretty funny night.