WEST SIIIIIIDE!!!

At the moment, I'm relaxing in Nelson after finishing my trip up the South Island's remote West Coast region. It was a bittersweet journey...the scenery, as you would expect, was beautiful, but it was also my first major trip without Blue Steel. It took some adjustment to get used to bus travel, but it's still pretty easy in the end.

Initially, though, I thought I'd try to circumvent the whole bus process entirely and travel on the cheap by hitching. The idea was sound in theory, but it was a different story in practice. The West Coast, I found out, is notorious for poor hitching conditions, mainly because so little car traffic goes through there. The road wasn't even completed until the 1960s! On top of that, I was trying to hitch from Wanaka to Makarora on Easter Sunday, and I don't think the holiday influence helped any. I was able to get a lift about 15 minutes north to Lake Hawea, where I thought I might be able to thumb a ride further north. Unfortunately, it seemed that just about every northbound car on that road was headed for Lake Hawea...most of them had boats in tow. After standing by the side of the road for a few hours, I gave up and walked about 15 km back to Wanaka to regroup and buy a bus ticket. It turned out to be a nice walk, though. It's amazing what you miss when you speed by places in a car...unique and quirky homes, scenes of families enjoying the holiday together and whatnot.

I decided to skip Makarora and head straight up to the glaciers. NZ has two major glaciers: Fox and Franz Josef. I chose to check out Franz Josef, mainly because it had a more developed village (based almost entirely on tourism) to entertain me if the weather was bad. Luckily, the weather, while not perfect, was good enough for me to do a full day guided glacier hike. I was debating whether or not to go out on the glacier at all...how much fun can walking around on a huge hunk of ice be in the first place?

Quite a lot, it turns out. Dayle, our guide, was able to take us about halfway up the front face of the glacier, which was full of impressive ice formations. I was amazed at his skill with the ice axe: occasionally we'd end up in a crevice that I thought looked totally unnavigable, but, with a few swings of the axe, he'd carve a set of expertly-placed steps to get us into the next gully. Here are a few pics from the expedition:

Looking down into the valley carved by Franz Josef glacier:

Sneaking through an ice tunnel:

Dayle carving his way through a hallway of ice:

Another shot of Dayle to provide a sense of scale...these were some big ice formations!:

Peering out through a hole in the ice:

Throughout the glacier walk, a recurring thought kept popping into my head: "There is no way these trips could ever happen in the USA." While we were never in mortal danger, we were often in pretty precarious situations where a false step could lead to a sprained ankle, twisted knee, or broken wrist. Dayle mentioned that the guiding company has to do several medevac trips each month. And, in a particularly sobering reminder of the danger lurking in the glaciers, someone on an ice climbing tour had died on the glacier about two weeks earlier. Apparently he got tangled up in his crampon straps and fell into a deep, narrow crevice. Not good. Of course, all this adds up to paint a legally infeasible picture that would prevent a company from ever offering such trips in the overly litigious USA.

Anyways, after "doing" Franz Josef glacier, I hopped on the bus and headed up to Punakaiki, home of the famous "pancake rocks," which are stratified and eroded in such a way as to make them appear somewhat like stacks of flapjacks:

I wasn't really in Punakaiki to see the pancake rocks, though. My main reason for going there was to hike the Inland Pack Track, which used to be a route used by gold miners in the 1860s to avoid the rugged coast. The highlight of the hike was the section through the Dilemma Creek gorge, where the track and the creek become one. I hiked along the creekbed, surrounded by towering limestone cliffs and exotic-looking native vegetation. To avoid deep pools, I had to ford the creek about 40 times and I got totally soaked from the knee down. No big deal, though. I suppose that's the nice thing about having mucked around on Stewart Island previously: all other discomforts seem tame in comparison to that kind of bog-bashing.

The other nice thing about the track is that you get to camp out under a massive limestone overhang called "The Ballroom," which is 20 meters high at its highest point:

When I first showed up, I had the place all to myself, and it stayed like that for several hours. Later on, though, I heard some rustling sounds in the bush and saw someone emerge into the clearing. "Oh well," I thought, "there's plenty of space under here for two." But then another hiker appeared. And another. And another. It turns out that certain hiking tour companies like to take groups to The Ballroom because it seems adventurous (even though it's only a two-hour hike from the highway). So I shared the spot with 10 other hikers and their guide. It was actually pretty nice to hang out with the group. I spent a while talking to an English guy who surprised my by his knowledge of Garrison Keillor...I had no idea that he had appeal outside of the Midwest, much less the entire country! I don't think the Englishman was fully able to appreciate the Minnesotan/Lutheran/Norwegian humor, though.

The next day I hiked out to the parking lot, where I had arranged for the bus to Nelson to pick me up. It was over an hour late, though, and on top of that, there were sandflies all over the place. So I spent a good hour or so wandering around the parking lot, pacing back and forth to keep the sandflies off. I'm sure I must have appeared completely insane to the other tourists who came by.

Which brings me to Nelson. I've been staying at a great little hostel called "Tramper's Rest," which seemed appropriate for me because, well, I'm a tramper and I could use some rest. Tomorrow I plan on starting the Abel Tasman Coastal Track, which will probably be my last hike in NZ. Kinda sad, but it should be beautiful, at least. Look for an update in a few days when I get back to Nelson.