so here we are in fox glacier!! this is the west side of new zealand, we kinda zigzagged around a bit! the weather wasnt brilliant but it didnt rain which was great in itself! the glacier is actually compacted snow as oppose to frozen water and if you look close up and you can kind of see that! we had to hike in the temperate rainforest for about an hour to get to a safe point on the glacier to hike. more snow falls that glacier melts so this glacier is getting bigger every year, and with the daily earth movements new crevasses open/crack everyday. when we got to the beginning of the hike we realised that people have to hack out steps for us to climb over the glacier everyday - ie the earths movments make the previous steps unsafe! mad!


the closer to the glacier we got the colder it got - i bought a possum fur hat/scalf - and before any animal protesters get me i did check and yes its real but possums are a huge problem in new zealand killing wildlife and rainforest so really im helping to preserve the beautiful new zealand by buying it! and thank god, it kept me so nice and snug! it was such an amazing place to visit the surroundings were so picturesque, the rainforest and mountains all around, the glacier going up behind us to higher points and the river flowing from the melted glacier at the front. its one of only 2 glaciers in the world which has a temperate rainforest meeting the glacier - normally the temperate rainforest causes the glacier to melt at much faster rates consequently disappearing, but not here because the cold weather from the one side meets the warm weather from australia making a perfect snow temperature and increasing the size of the glacier. well something like that! the hike was a lot of fun, we did have a few girlie girls who didn't overly enjoy it but we thought it was great! the last pic is pretty much everyone on our tour, dont we all look happy! cool huh!