I don't like alarm clocks, but we had to be at the glacier tour company just after 8, so it was necessary. We made a quick lunch, dressed in many warm layers and crossed the road. They let us take our own boots, but gave us really cool spikes to clip onto them later. We took a bus to a car park. As we got off, we were all given pickaxes "to play with". I was very excited but the guide looked a little worried. We all walked over stones and rivers for almost an hour to the start of the ice. There were eight of us in all in our group, all friendly and most Canadian. I thought we looked like (slightly more than) the seven dwarfs, with our axes and backpacks and I sang the dwarf song until Mikey made me shush. After crossing lots of rivers, looking at huge waterfalls and being told about the Franz Josef glacier (it was named after the Austro-Hungarian emperor after the Austrian guy who discovered it had already named too many things, including a glacier, after himself. It apparently reminded Haast of the emperor's beard) we put our shoe spikes on. A kea, an alpine parrot, came to see us and posed for a few photos. His feathers were dull green on top, but bright orange underneath his wings when he flapped.

Now that we were at the foot of the ice we could use our axes (only as walking sticks, though) and we tramped over pre-cut steps up the front of the glacier. It took a couple of hours of uphill walking to get past the dirty, rocky parts and we were happily traipsing over wibbly, shiny ice hills. We practised walking down steep hills by digging our spikes into the ice, and also climbing up ice walls by using the axe to pull ourselves up. It was very strange walking over the rocky morraine at the foot of the glacier and seeing clear ice underneath, and I loved the way the ground glowed blue. After the gentle slopes of the lower parts came crevasses and gullies and big towering walls of gorgeous blue. The sun was in its element, everything was bright and blue or white, gentle, rippled curves and dimples and sparkling ice.

We stopped for lunch on a high, glassy hill, and had to dig our feet into the ground to stop ourselves sliding around. The afternoon was more beautiful walks, bits of climbing with ropes and clambering over ground on which even with the crampons we could get no purchase. It was hard to get used to the idea that your arms are pretty useless when climbing on ice because the walls are so slippery that you can't pull yourself up or use them to keep your balance. Later on, we were taken to particularly scenic bits of ice so that we could take photos, and my favourite was a sideways cave, only about a foot tall, but several feet wide and sloping down into a trench of icy water. I slid in first, lost my grip (actually, I had no grip at all) and ended up in the slushy water at the bottom before scrambling up the slope again and into the sunshine. I enjoyed it so much that I went twice.

On the way back down, the sun had melted a lot of the ice, making the walking a bit easier but also forming sparkling streams and small pools all over the place that we could drink from. Finally the sun was hidden by the mountain and it began to get cold quite quickly, especially as I was soaking! We made our way back down the glacier and once in the rocky valley at the bottom we wandered into the rainforesty woods and back to the bus.

Back in Franz Josef we bought supper and then sat in the motel's hot tub for half an hour. A fantastic day.