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We are at Fox Glacier today and we went on two short contrasting walks that highlighted some interesting facts about New Zealand. The first was to the end of the Fox Gacier, thsecond around Mathison Lake both near our camp site. We thought we'd share our new found knowledge with you. Are you sitting comfortabley?
The Fox and Franz Josef glaciers are the only ones in the world that end in temperate rain forest. This gives the strange juxtaposition of raw, rugged glacial landscape abutting lush green forest.
The Fox Glacier has retreated 1 km since 2008, so tourist now have to walk further to see it. We were clad in boots but yet again the prefered footwear for some visitors was flip flops. There were lots of warnings of flood, landslips and weather turning foul.
The Southern Alps are rising between 10 and 20 mm per year so since Mike was last here they are a foot higher.
New Zealand has only two native mammal species and both are bats.
Hebes,grown in many british gardens, are a native bush in new zealand.
The annual rainfall for the mountain tops is 16 metres and 5 metres in the village some of which we experienced during the night. It's still nice and warm though.
Male sandflys don't bight humans only the females as they need the energy from the blood to produce eggs. A good deet based insect repellant deters the blighters as does wearing white, green or yellow alegedly.
Our own observation is that there are a lot of young brits working in Fox Glacier village. We met folks from Preston, Warrington and Scotland.
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