South Island Bus Adventure Day 6: Fox - Franz Josef Glacier

Wow, sorry for the long delay between posts! With my trip to Australia and all of my recent tests, I guess I sort of lost momentum for the blog. Never fear! I have plenty to say about Sydney, but I want to finish off my South Island trip report first. Then I can write about Australia and get back to blogging about non-travel things, like exam season and the upcoming GST rate hike on Friday.

Anyway, when we last left our story, I was asleep in the Ivory Towers lodge in Fox Glacier, Westland, when I woke up to a pitch dark room in the wee hours of the morning. I usually leave a curtain or something open when I go to sleep, so I'm not used to a entirely dark room--and this one seemed darker than any I'd experienced in a long time. In my sleepy grogginess, I wondered if I had gone blind overnight. I fumbled around for my phone and checked the time: around 4:30 AM. I soon forgot about the puzzle of the dark room and went back to sleep.

A red dot surrounded by some concentric circles

As it turns out, I was probably awakened by the Canterbury Earthquake that struck near Christchurch at 4:35 AM on the morning of Saturday, 3 September. The earthquake hit 7.1 on the Richter scale, and caused an incredible amount of damage in Christchurch. Incredibly, no one was killed and only a few were hurt--probably because it happened on a Saturday morning when no one was in the CBD. I found out later that a friend of mine in my maths class, who lives in Christchurch, had his chimney topple over and his swimming pool cracked by the quake.

In Fox Glacier, however, this was a temporary annoyance. The hostel owner bustled around trying to turn on a generator (the darkness earlier was because the town had lost power). My bus driver, Glenn, said that it was "probably a 4 or a 5" on the Richter scale, and assured me these things happened all the time.

I was Glenn's only passenger for the short 45 minute ride north to Franz Josef, so we had a little conversation. "I could have turned out going down your path," he said, referring to my time at university. Glenn was an A student at school who got disillusioned with the rules and left to go work in a foundary, travel, and do other odd jobs. After many years of doing this, "[he] met a woman" who convinced him he needed to clean up, get a haircut and a respectible job. He was drawn to driving coach buses, and had been doing so for the last seven years. Glenn also told me he continued to like studying, and that he was a "researcher" (I'm not sure of what). We had a long conversation about the balance of power in the US, and Glenn was convinced that there are people "behind the curtain" pulling the strings and controlling all the world's power.

Downtown Franz Josef village

When I got to the Franz Josef hostel, I watched the breaking news coverage of the earthquake in their TV room. The early impression was that it wasn't too bad, and not much was damaged. Only later on in the day was the true extent of the damage (billions of dollars) seen, and the CBD was cordoned off due to the risk of aftershocks. Isolated from this, I decided that even though I had seen Fox Glacier the previous day, it would be worth checking out Franz Josef later in the day.

I got a shuttle to the glacier and walked a kilometer or two to the point beyond which I would need a guide. Everyone was returning from their earlier trips, so it was mostly quiet in the direction I was walking. Franz Josef Glacier had an even larger glacial rock "bed" with cascading waterfalls on either side and the glacier in front. While this glacier didn't have Mount Cook towering overhead, it was still an amazing sight. When I got to the face, there was no one around. I sat down and took in what was around me. I think I'll let the pictures do the talking here.

While I was having dinner, I learned on the TV screen of the second of the day's catastrophes. A small skydiving plane had gone down in Fox Glacier, and nine people died. The Christchurch earthquake pushed this story to the sidelines, but it hit me very close to home. I had started out the day in Fox Glacier. Maybe some of those people had stayed in the hostel with me the night before (there was only one hostel in town). As if that wasn't enough, the Christchurch earthquake turned out to be worse than people had originally thought. I went back and checked my emails on the hostel computer, and found that the earthquake had made international news, and people were wondering where I was and if I was OK.

By this point, the news of the day's disasters had left me in a pretty agitated emotional state. After I sent replies to these emails and got over my guilt trip for not checking in sooner, I decided to reschedule my trip to avoid Christchurch and come back to Auckland a few days early. I didn't want my last memory of the South Island to be a ruined Christchurch, and even though the airport was operating, I didn't know if the city was ready for visitors or not. Plus, I was starting to get a little weary of staying in a different place nearly every night. I found a flight from Dunedin to Auckland on Wednesday night and booked it the next morning.

With that, it was time to say goodbye to the glaciers and make my way east through the Pisa Range to Queenstown.