The world must be liberated from the sand-fly

Did I tell you we landed on a glacier in a helicopter? Oh. Shame. I could tell you all about it again. Okay then, I’ll wait till we’re home.

Via Queenstown (which we are not telling Peter and Simon about because we think they would love it there) and Arrowtown which is almost as it was in the gold rush

and fascinating, we got to the Franz Joseph Glacier – the one we would have choppered to had we not done that at Milford. The day we were at Franz Joseph the weather was pretty good and we would have been able to fly but we are certain we made exactly the right decision to do it at Milford: the cloud was quite low and I’m not even sure the helicopters were actually landing on the glacier.

It is a remarkable sight even from the ground. A glacier: thick, thick, blue ice but at a level you simply walk up to. It’s a geological, ecological phenomenon which is (apparently) quite unusual and wonderful to look at.

After that we’ve travelled up the west coast passing through town after town, each consisting of huge estates of …well, just fields and forests and farms and coastline and a couple of houses. Beautiful scenery though.The beaches are universally grey shingle which is actually harvested from the rivers and used in copious quantities on the roads. Greymouth doesn’t exactly sell itself well, either,with a sign which says “Welcome to the Grey Area”! Greymouth was, in fact, the mining town which had that disaster around the time of the miraculous Chilean miners rescue, but it really is just a working town and not much for tourists. The beaches are not only grey but largely inaccessible because between the road and the coast is mainly farmland. It’s as though the sea is just ‘there’ and isn’t seen as having a tourist potential: it doesn’t really because of its greyness and because of NZ’s most evil bird of prey – the sand-fly. They land on you and, before you know it, they’ve unpacked their blankets and thermos flasks, used you as a raw barbeque and beggared off. Evil, evil, evil creatures leaving Heather and me to share one remaining functioning leg.

But we have found some wonderful places to picnic sans sand-fly:

seen the Pancake Rocks:

and some more fur seals.

(Si, I was at full zoom from about 20 metres away and I’ve cropped this – not bad, I think.)

The weather remains very kind to us and notably warmer as we have moved further north.

We have been out of internet range for a while and keeping tabs on news hasn’t been easy, with even radio stations hard to get at times. But the Tokyo quake has been met with some shock here. People on west coast beaches were warned not to swim for fear of a tsunami and Blenheim, where we head for in the next day or so, had a 2.1 wobble yesterday. When an air raid-type siren woke us at 3am this morning we thought it must be a warning of a quake near to us but we discovered in the morning (when it went off again at 7.30!) it was simply calling the volunteer firemen! We’ve still each got a change of trousers available thank goodness! 

We are having to plan the last few days of this part of the trip. We need to be within easy reach of Christchurch on Saturday with the van to take back ready for the flight to Hong Kong via Sydney.