The rain poured and poured through the night, but when we woke a 8am we peered outside to see bright sunshine. We asked the hostel porter to ring Glacier Guides who told us there was a 90% chance that the heli hike we had booked would run. We were so surprised that we had to rush to get dressed and sorted. We stopped in at a petrol station to grab a few survival snacks and drinks for the glacier before meeting up with the group and the Glacier Guides hut in town. I had just enough time to run back to the car for my sunglasses before the bus headed off to the helipad.
There we were given a saftey chat and provided with warm socks and heavy boots. Laura and I went in the second helicopter, a spectular flight up the glacier, soaring down over a huge turbulent water fall caused by the heavy over night rain. We landed on the ice and gingerly made our way to the rest of the group. The ice was completely slick, and the mere act of standing up was tricky – scary when carrying an expensive camera! The guide said that this was the slippiest he had seen it.
Thankfully we were then provided with crampons and a pole which made walking much easier and were then led up the glacier. The tour took in beautiful ice shelves, caves, deep holes (moulin bleu) and even some tiny ice worms that could be spied in the pools of water that littered the surface of the ice. We were constantly slowed up by an old man with a camera stopping to take photographs and videos at every turn. I know that he was just making the most of his own glacier experience… but come on, show a bit of consideration! I would hate to be the one who has to sit through his three hour video of every pool of water of the glacier…
We spent abotu 2 hours on the glacier before the helicopter returned to collect us and we were bussed back into town. We stopped in at the little shop to grab some muesli and chicken pasta for lunch and dusted them off in the hostel canteen. Not being used to this hiking lark, we then headed to our room where we crashed for 3 hours before surfacing again.
After showering and freshening up, we drove out to Lake Mathieson for an hour’s walk around the lake. There was a little bit of wind which stirred up the water, somewhat breaking the promise of Reflection Island, but it was still a beautiful warm summer evening for a walk.
Back in town we headed for the Crook Saloon (or similar named spot) where I had a big chunky venison burger, with Laura on the chicken burger. Both were really tasty and just what we needed. We tried the pavlova for dessert, but the meringue was not great.
We then headed to the hostel to write up our diary and watched a little TV (which was quite the novelty) – some UK docudrama about a woman being unfairly dismissed from work. No, it was quite good, actually! Not long after that we were roused by the fire alarm and had to get dressed and head outside, thankfully it was a false alarm and the rain had stopped.
