Day 13 I’ll have the pancakes

We didn’t rush our morning and slept in a slight bit before just having breakfast in our hotel room. We just made some tea and some bread w/ honey on it. There was a hike along a river in this town and the entrance to the trail was just about 100 ft from our hotel, so we just walked up the road and right up the trail. This was a nice walk, all along a river. Since we were along the western coast the terrain was much different from the other hikes we’d taken earlier in our trip, the far side of the river was a shear cliff that shot straight up about several hundred feet. What was different about the river is that the water was sort of a brownish color, not in a nasty way, but more like it had stirred up mud or something, although we have no idea why it was that color. We walked in for about an hour before deciding to turn around and head back, evidently this hike could go for days if you wanted it to.

After returning from our morning walk we drove up the road about 5 miles to what is known as the pancake rocks, which was the whole reason we’d stopped in this location. I have to admit they were pretty cool to see. It was basically a formation of rocks that was formed on the coast due to the coastal tides and waves. What made this different from any other rock formation I’d ever seen is that they literally looked like pancakes stacked on top of each other. The rocks were basically in layers that appeared like they could just be peeled apart. From reading the plaques they had out there it seemed that scientists have yet to figure out why they actually formed that way. These rocks were just off the main road, so we were able to see them and get back to the car in about 15 to 20 minutes, it wasn’t exactly raining out, but it was misting and I didn’t feel like standing out in that for too long. Although we were told the weather was going to clear up and it’d be a nice day today.

We continued our drive down Highway 6, winding down the western coast for another hour and a half before stopping in the 1st major town for lunch. There aren’t too many big towns on the west coast, so we took this opportunity to jump into the store and grab some road snacks, get some gas, and have lunch.

From here it was another hour or so til we got to Franz Joseph, which is where one of two big glaciers were that we wanted to see. As we drove into the town I immediately saw what I hate to see, a handful of massive tour buses. Tour buses equals mounds of people trying to all get to the same places and see the same stuff we want to see, so we try to avoid them at all costs. We went into the information center here and found out the next town (about 30 min away) was much smaller and less touristed and accessed the other glacier, so we decided to just head there.

We quickly found a hotel in Fox Glacier, which had a full kitchen, we were thinking of going to the general store to get some eggs so we could make our own breakfast tomorrow morning. After checking into the hotel we drove about 10 minutes to the base of the glacier which was supposed to supply us with an hour walk up to and back from the glacier ice. What has been funny is that since we’ve done a handful of 4 hour hikes, these one to two hour ones seem silly to us now. Anyhow, it was windy and cold up by the glacier, although not raining, which was good. We basically hiked 30 minutes up a very rough rock canyon which is the result of the glacier retreating over the past decade. There were high cliff faces on both sides of us, and many waterfalls toppling over the edges and down to streams that we had to skip over en route to the glacier. When we reached the end there was one other couple out there, and it happened to be the two from Folsom that we had met several days ago up at Abel Talisman for the kayaking trip. You couldn’t get right up to the glacier, but the trail stopped around 100 ft short of it, but the thing was massive and there were some spots where you could see the baby blue ice that these glaciers are known for.

After the hour walk by the glaciers we came back into town and walked up to the local tavern for dinner, turned out the Folsom couple was there as well, it was becoming funny seeing them everywhere we went. The food was decent but I really wanted to find a wireless connection since it’d been about 4 days since I’d been online and I wasn’t able to find a connection that’d work.

After dinner we made a quick stop at a pub for one Tui and are now back in our room for the evening. Tomorrow we’ll take a relaxing morning for breakfast and then go on a couple more hikes around here before heading down to Hast which is only about 2 hours away, further down the coast.