Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Up at the crack of dawn... well 7.30am (that’s the crack of dawn for me)!
It was so fresh outside today, bloody lovely to feel so fresh! We then had to tramp up the road to Apex car rental to pick our car up.
I forgot to ask Ellie to bring my new UK license out with her and my Emirates license ran out about three days ago which is absolutely typical, only means one thing and that Ellie is the designated driver of the hire car and I can be the designated drinker haha! (It’s a shame we are t-total for a while!)
We had such a bargain, 80$ for four days to transfer a car for a rental car company from one city to the next, and that’s much cheaper and easier for us to get up to mount Cook village and lake tekapo without taking expensive shuttle buses.
The weather is b-e-a-utiful! Let’s hope that we’ll be second time lucky for this heli hike! We’re just in the other side of mount Cook and the southern alps now and the weather forecast for today only is AWESOME!
The drive as always was so scenic and absolutely dead of cars, literally nobody anywhere which was nice I suppose! We had a quick stop at Mrs Jones fruit and veg stall again on the way back through to get some cheap but delicious fruit and veg for breakfasts and dinner tonight.
We did have one little bit of excitement though! A police car came whizzing passed us with their lights on... hmm thought it was a little strange and out of context considering there was nothing or nobody anywhere! We thought oh god maybe there was an accident or maybe because it’s so barren here the police are first responders too?
Well we soon found out about 10/15 minutes later haha!!
We came around the corner, a road works van stopped in the road on the opposite side, the red police car and a silver civilian’s car with a huge minibus off the road down in a ditch with the drivers door open.
First thing I see is two men in orange high vis and a police officer over he top of a guy... oh god I thought they were doing CPR! Only to notice the guy was very much alive and well wriggling around on the floor and these guys were actually trying to pin the guy down to the floor. What the hell had he done!?
A guy that just so happened to be driving passed when it all happened came and spoke to us to tell us that we may be a little while and to just sit and wait because it seems as though this guy was a loonatic and has been on the run from the coppers but they have finally tracked him down!
Well... it was like bloody CSI Miami only New Zealand haha! Don’t mind us, we were quite happy to sit and wait whilst we munched on our Mrs Jones Apple! It was like being first row at the movies! We turned our car engine off to try and listen to the guy shouting. He had been tazered and wouldn’t sit up or stand up for them to get him out of the middle of the road, he just kept going limp. Then he was spitting the water out that there were giving him so they were pouring it over his head, haha! The older men looked like they were bending down to give him a piece of their mind. Then we heard him shout “help me, save me, they’re trying to kill me!” Ahh this was fantastic entertainment haha!
He had no shoes or top on, looked like he was covered in mud and had stolen this minibus, the windows smashed from the police officer maybe smashing it to get him out and I’m assuming as he tried to run away he tazered him in the middle of the road. If only we were ten minutes earlier we would have seen it all happen!
Back up arrived and they managed to drag him to the side of the road so we could head off. What an exciting 15 minutes! It was brilliant haha!
The journey again continued to be spectacular through Lindis pass and into Twizel and mount Cook village. We had never ever seen such beautiful blue water, it was ice glacier blue absolutely incredible!! And with the mountains in the background, you couldn’t get a camera to take a picture to describe how incredible it all looked honestly absolutely insane!!
A few lovey stops along the way, the weather is perfect! We got to YHA around 12.30pm just in time to hop on the shuttle down to the mini airport that you took the helicopter from, this is further than we got last time!!
All steam ahead, suited up with shoes and crampons for the ice. We were told the glacier was warm up there today because of no cloud cover so we didn’t need extra layers. One thermal it was!
A brief check in before heading to the chopper, woohoo!! It’s happening - bucket list s***!
It was only a 7-10minute helicopter ride up to the glacier but it was still such a pretty ride up there over the Tasman and hooker river and into the Mount Cook/Tasman Glacier! If we had walked it would have taken us 9 hours to get to the end of it and then another few hours to try and dangerously climb the ice. There was so much gravel everywhere which made it look like there wasn’t ice in very many places - looks can be deceiving! There was hundreds of metres of ice underneath it, the gravel was from the landslides that they have had in the last few weeks from all the rain. Some of the snow was also orange from the dust and dirt that had blown over from Australia’s bush fires in the weekend! Our guides took us on a hike through the craveses of the glaciers (the big cracks in between them) they were so blue! We had to be careful of the edges because the holes could be at least 200m deep!! Holy s*** balls, I didn’t want to fall down those!! Looking at the ice from far away or in the helicopter it just looked like snow but it was literal big balls and pieces of ice compacted together!
After a two hour hike we had to get the helicopter back... what a shame! We had to fly into mount Cook island - AMAZING! The tallest mountain in Australasia. Couldn’t help but smile the entire time we were there!!
after the hike we headed back to the hostel and met a few of the girls there to do the hooker valley trail which was a beautiful track on the other side of the mountain that went through the valley and up the hooker river and lake to the hooker glacier at the bottom of the other side of the mighty mount Cook.
What an absolute day we have had with weather! We couldn’t chance not doing the three hour walk at 5pm in case the weather forecast was correct for s***ty weather tomorrow, it doesn’t get dark until 8.45pm so we were good on sunlight.
Considering it was a great rubble path and well constructed it was a decent 10km still!
Absolutely shattered from the adrenaline shocks and the walk today we just about made some stir fry with our veg and hit the hay, I could barely eat I was so tired. I’m sure I was asleep by 9pm! (It didn’t help that the bed was so comfy aswell!)
- comments