Black Mirror*

3 March 2010
During the night we heard torrential rain on a number of occasions – we weren’t surprised as without the rain there wouldn’t be all these thousands of hectares of rainforest nor would the glaciers continue to exist because high up in the Southern Alps the rain either falls as snow or is turned immediately to ice which compacts to form the glacier. To put it into perspective the visitors’ centre in Franz Josef has comparable average rainfalls – Los Angeles: 300mm; London 600mm; Franz Joseph 5100mm. We got up early because we had numerous plans for today which immediately had to be changed because the cloud layer was very low – we had hoped to take a helicopter flight to the top of one of the glaciers and go for a hike over the ice but there was no chance of that the cloud level meant there would be no helicopter flights this morning.

Instead we drove the 25km over to Fox Glacier because there is always chance of better weather there. An interesting serendipity; Fox’s Glacier Mints were originally marketed in the UK, allegedly, without any knowledge that a place existed in NZ called Fox Glacier. Actually the sweet company was probably in denial because the glaciers were originally called Albert and Victoria after a British couple who were social security scroungers (and didn’t know about contraception) but in 1865 geologist Julius von Haast (who will appear later in another blog) renamed one Franz Josef after the Austro-Hungarian emperor and the other one was named Fox after a visit by prime minister William Fox in 1872.
Our first stop was at Lake Matheson, from where every picture book about NZ has a photograph of Mount Cook and Mount Tasman reflected. Of course that is on a clear day and today there was a lot of low cloud. Nonetheless we decided to do the 4.5km walk around the lake (another kettle lake created by the retreating glacier 14,000 years ago) because it passes through native bush and rainforest and on the off chance that the cloud might clear long enough for us to see the two snow-capped mountains. At the beginning of the walk is a swing bridge, very aptly named.

These swaying pedestrian footbridges are common but almost unique to NZ and great fun to walk over especially when there are two or more people. We enjoyed the walk very much and photographed innumerable different fern varieties – we have discovered that there are an enormous variety of tree ferns, most them impossible to distinguish from one another unless you are a dendronologist (G might have made that word up but he’s sure it’s the correct one for a fern expert). The rain forest was still quietly dripping from last night’s rain and the ground was in a permanent state of sogginess. The lake itself was dark, mysterious and very still, consequently it reflects the surrounding scenery superbly - rather like a black mirror. At one point the cloud cleared just enough for us to see the almost perfect reflection but as perfection is an imperfect thing our reflection was perfection for us.

We then went on to Fox Glacier, which though smaller than Franz Joseph glacier is more impressive because more of it is visible from the base. We walked along the wide river bed left by the retreating glacier, which is strewn with huge boulders and on one side has a sheer cliff face, we also had to ford a couple of streams to get there.