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We had a pretty long but very scenic drive from Blenheim in the North East of the South Island, over to Punakaiki on the west coast. It is a beautiful spot, although a lot of tourists due to the time of year. We were expecting it to be rainy here but the weather forcasters got it wrong, so once we'd dumped our stuff into our hostel room we went for a good walk along the beautiful beach on our doorstep. Then we just made some tea and chilled out for the evening. The next day we drove just down the road and found a cavern to explore, luckily I had my trusty headtorch so I led the way. The celiing got lower and lower and there really wasn't anything to see so we backed out again and walked a bit further to the 'pancake roacks and blowholes' walk. This was a lovely little man made walkway with native plants and trees all around. The pancake rocks, which were in the sea but we could overlook them from the lookout platforms, were awesome. Really odd shapes but very interesting. Unfortunately we were there at the wrong time of day to see any blowholes in action, I still don't really know what they are!
We continued to drive down the coast and stopped off at a town called Greymouth for a picnic lunch, then further down the road we came across 'Shantytown' - a village created in the style of how it would have been during the gold rush here in the late 1800s. It was actually quite interesting, lots of chinese people imigrated here at the time and a lot of miners moved their families there so lots of new towns were made. Plus we rode on a steam train and had a nice ice cream! I was in my element!
We cracked on with the drive and pulled up in Frans Josef for the night at a hostel which was really nice. We made some tea, watched a film and got chatting to some english guys who had planned to go up onto the glacier that day but once they were all kitted out and sat in the helicopter they were told that it was too cloudy to fly today - gutted! The only way on to the actual glacier is by helicopter and it costs $399, which is £200. I'm sure it'd be awesome but we decided the next day that we would walk to the base of it instead! It was a lovely walk and there were some pretty waterfalls on the way but we weren't blown away by the view as you couldn't get that close to the glacier.
We got back to the car and drove about 20km down the road to Fox Glacier and decided that we would do that walk too, and we were really glad we'd made that decision as it was so much more stunning than Frans Josef. I'm sure the photos won't do it justice but it was more overwhelming and pretty, you could see all the shades of blue in the ice and all the shapes in the ice that had been formed by water trickling over it for hundereds of years. Very cool.
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