Jan. 5

Franz Josef Glacier to Greymouth, via Fox Glacier

On the other side of Mt. Cook and its posse of nearby peaks, snow piles and compresses into ice, which snakes down mountain valleys. Two of the glaciers, Franz Josef and Fox, are in valleys narrow enough the ice makes its way down to the flat land at the base of the mountains.
We don't spend the money to walk on the glacier or in the ice caves, or to fly over the ice and the Alps. We do take the walks to the ice face of both.
It is odd to think of a giant block of ice as a moving stream, and they say these glaciers are advancing at the rate of about a meter a week, and can move as fast as a meter a day.
It's also odd to see the ice face - the glaciers don't gradually give way to rock, they suddenly stop. Walking up to them, you follow a wide, rocky valley floor interrupted by streams of water. Suddenly, the rock gives way to an ice wall 20 or 30 feet high.
Both are impressive, but on this day Fox Glacier is the more interesting of the two. The approach to Fox is in a narrow valley, with ice-scraped rock walls on both sides, from the centuries before when the ice made a strong advance.
Then, there is an hour-long walk along the side of the valley to the ice. A rope is up about 100 feet from the ice, warning people of falling ice, but most visitors ignore the warnings and the rope and walk up to where a strong flow of water comes out from below the ice, carrying away blocks of ice and the water that has finally regained its liquid form.

We head north, and decide to stop in Greymouth. Another nondescript town, it is the second town on our trip for which a slogan immediately springs to mind.
"Greymouth. Better than Invercargill."