It didn’t augur well from the start. For my first visit to New Zealand, my friend, a long-time South Island resident, had prepared an action-packed schedule that totally ignored the fact that I’m a non-action sort of person. I skimmed the itinerary and saw a lakeside picnic – wonderful. A winery tour – excellent. A power speedboat trip – well, maybe. And then three incomprehensible words: walk the glacier. What? Walk the glacier? This had to be a typo. I emailed her urgently. “You’ll love it,” she assured me. It’s just like hiking, she added – only a little bit colder.
It was a lot colder. December in New Zealand was supposed to be like June in the northern hemisphere. Warm spring days, I’d envisioned. Instead, it was cold enough for electric blankets every night. For gloves and scarves every day. And to snigger, feebly, any time someone commented on how mild it was.
It was colder still, with air that was tinged with an unmistakable iciness, when we arrived at Franz Josef, the small town on the edge of the Southern Alps that is home to the 12km-long, 2,700m-high glacier of the same name. Geologist and explorer Julius von Haast named it in 1865 after the Austrian emperor Franz Josef.
We would approach the glacier, we were told, after a 2.5km rainforest walk. I was looking forward to that – I expected it to be warm. Wrong. It was a temperate rainforest. Green, dense and richly alive, yes. Warm and steamy, definitely not. I did remove one of the four layers I was wearing, and even drank some water, but hot I was not.
The rainforest opened onto a stony valley floor and a 45-minute trek over rough terrain lay ahead to reach the foot of the glacier. But who cared? The glacier already loomed before us, and it was a beautiful, awesome sight. A wide passage of ice descended like a flouncy skirt from under a hazy white mist that completely shrouded the top of the mountain. On either side of the glacier rose green-covered mountains, making the ice seem magically unlikely. It looked ethereal. And menacing. At last, I was excited.
Just before we reached the ice, we sat down and put on our crampons – tie-on metal spikes that fit around hiking boots and would help us maintain our grip. The tighter they were, the safer we’d be, our guide told us. If you get injured on the glacier, the only way down is by an expensive helicopter ride, he said (adding that only wimps actually do that). There have been fatalities, too – an Australian tourist fell to his death here in June 2010.
We began to climb. We learned to walk with our legs shoulder-width apart, to place each foot down flat on the ice, and never to run (“as if,” I thought). Our guide went ahead, hacking away with his ice pick to make neat little steps for us. Still, it was slippery. Narrow, three-metre-deep crevices were everywhere, as were small caves made of ice, and miniature waterfalls. Above us, the smoky mist never lifted, and it seemed we were climbing into the clouds.
On and up we went, zigzagging, climbing, pulling ourselves along on ropes, sliding and crunching. It was exhilarating. By the time we reached what was for us the summit, we were starving but invigorated.
The descent was easier, but the long trek over the stony floor felt longer, and no one spoke as we plodded, single file, back through the rainforest. Warm at last, I removed another layer. I was tired, but felt wonderful, and grateful to my friend. How she’d known that I’d love glaciers, I had no idea.
