02-04-07Weather report - Bright sunshine ;o)
We popped across to our usual breakfast watering hole, to find we were too early, so had to find an alternative. On the way Deb bought her birthday chocolates which she missed out on the night before!
Alll packed and ready to go for 10, checked out of the hotel and set off for the climb over the Crown Range again to begin our long trip to Franz Josef. And what a trip it was, this must be one of the best drives in the world! You drive through massive valleys and past huge clear lakes carved out millions of years ago in the glacial age, and then into dense sub-tropical primeval rain forest. I imagine some of this landscape has never seen a human before, who knows whats living in there! To top it all we had glorious sunshine most of the way, it was only until we reached the glacier area on the West Coast did we hit some rain. This was a front blowing in from the sea and considering they get 240 days of rain a year, to be expected.
We found our next stop ok, the Glacier View Cottages just outside Franz Josef. This is going to be a good stop, you got that nice feeling as soon as you drove up the track and saw the setting the cottages sit in, even though it was drizzly. I'm writing this now, a day or so later with the sun coming down loooking up at the Franz Josef Glacier and snow capped mountains ;o)
We finished the day by buying a few groceries from the village store and cooked our own dinner, for the first time since we left the UK! FIngers crossed for a sunny morning, as we booked a helicopter flight for the next morning.
We popped across to our usual breakfast watering hole, to find we were too early, so had to find an alternative. On the way Deb bought her birthday chocolates which she missed out on the night before!
Alll packed and ready to go for 10, checked out of the hotel and set off for the climb over the Crown Range again to begin our long trip to Franz Josef. And what a trip it was, this must be one of the best drives in the world! You drive through massive valleys and past huge clear lakes carved out millions of years ago in the glacial age, and then into dense sub-tropical primeval rain forest. I imagine some of this landscape has never seen a human before, who knows whats living in there! To top it all we had glorious sunshine most of the way, it was only until we reached the glacier area on the West Coast did we hit some rain. This was a front blowing in from the sea and considering they get 240 days of rain a year, to be expected.
We found our next stop ok, the Glacier View Cottages just outside Franz Josef. This is going to be a good stop, you got that nice feeling as soon as you drove up the track and saw the setting the cottages sit in, even though it was drizzly. I'm writing this now, a day or so later with the sun coming down loooking up at the Franz Josef Glacier and snow capped mountains ;o)
We finished the day by buying a few groceries from the village store and cooked our own dinner, for the first time since we left the UK! FIngers crossed for a sunny morning, as we booked a helicopter flight for the next morning.
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