Winter 2019 - NZ17 Fox Glacier

NZ17   Fox Glacier

It did bother me that I didn’t have the daily route in my GPS, so last night in Hanmer I fiddled around with the primitive GPS we had and entered the roads written up in the ‘brochure’.

I am ready to find the Fox Glacier, some 500 km away; it will be a long day’s ride, I thought. But at least I have the route now in my machine.

When we started off riding in the morning, however, Fred informed all that he is not going the planned route; he is taking the highway instead. We are not going over Arthur's Pass; we are taking Rt. 7 going west and then the Highway 6 South. An easier route he said, faster, too.

So we kind of back-tracked over the Lewis pass and rode Rt. 7 until it ended at Highway 6, and then just made a left. It was a straight run towards the Fox Glacier. Highway 6 is a major road that runs along the most Western part of the South Island of NZ. 

A Painting of the Area We Rode Through Today

This road is mountainous and all the weather comes into NZ from the westerly direction. The clouds get stuck on these mountains and it rains a lot. It’s kind of Seattle in Washington State, U.S., where it rains because the moisture condenses against the mountains. It’s beautifully green but wet. The road is well made and the riding was swift and we arrived much earlier than we thought near the Fox Glacier. At the higher elevations, in the mountains, the rain turns to snow and in the eons since this has happened, glaciers have formed, some small, some larger. The 2 most famous are Franz-Joseph Glacier and the Fox Glacier. We headed for the Fox for some reason. It was an overnight stay, no group plans were made to visit the glacier, and we did not even ride near it.

We, Carol and I, had booked an independent helicopter tour over the Glacier for the next morning at 8 AM, weather permitting. We had made those plans in Bali and were looking forward to this experience but… we had heavy rains the following day, and the helicopter ride was cancelled. Well, we cancelled with the company, because they would not pick us up at the hotel, we would have to ride to meet them someplace but they could not give us specific instructions on how to get to them. It was, when we called, too much trouble for them to send us an email with a map, or something like that, the tour company did not know our hotel, etc. it sounded as if they were not really interested in us taking the helicopter, so we just cancelled. 

I think our cancellation was a good thing, because the next day we had rain, soaking wet rain and a bit of fog. We would not have had much fun on the glacier. Another couple who rode in our group, did the same, they cancelled their tour, too.

The next day’s weather was just bad.

So far we had had very little to no rain, but once we rode on this Highway 6 we got soaked.

Highway 6 is a wonderful road, don’t get me wrong, but I was a bit ticked off that we did not follow the route in the brochure. Why did Fred change the route?