Wednesday, February 18, 2009 Posted in New Zealand
Gillespies beach is located next to the Fox Glacier. The day we went was absolutely beautiful. We did some photography and saw lots of Dolphins and Seals.
Here is a pano of the mountains from there.
The beach.
This picture was a complete accident, and I did not realize it. I was just looking through the images and Andre’a caught that there was actually a dolphin jumping in the background…. I was just taking a picture of the seal. And at the exact instant I took the picture the dolphin just happened to jump up…. or maybe I am just that good…..
So, we started seeing a lot of dolphins jumping around and tried my best to take their pictures. I think there was around 15-20 but Andre”a will say more like 8-10. But there were a lot!!
This picture is just a closely cropped picture of the one under it.
Oh yeah, did I mention that we walked through a seal colony….
A couple of weeks ago the Okarito Lagoon closed up. Usually the water flows from the lagoon into the ocean or the other way around (depending on the tides). But every once in a while it gets blocked up by sand…. and no one knows why. It just does. But when it gets blocked off you can walk across to the other side of the lagoon on the “land bridge”… or take the quad bike like we did (it’s much faster than walking). It was sweet going over there because it looks totally different than on our side of the lagoon. There are great views of the mountains and it is just neat-o. Here is a panoramic shot from over there.
Andre’a finally let me take the trek down to the face of the glacier. Oh yeah, we did this like a month ago and just now realized we forgot to post. It was really spectacular to get that close to it. The day we went was beautifully sunny and really warm… but the closer we got to the glacier the cooler the air felt… who knew! It was like we were standing next to a big AC or something. We were warned not to get to close to the face because you never know when a chunk the size of a house may fall off. About a week before we went, 2 people were killed at Fox glacier (20 minutes away) for standing under an ice cave at the terminal face (like the one behind us in the first picture.) Unfortunately, the ice collapsed in the cave. It was big news around here. So we were extra careful. Don”t worry mom! We were still 200 meters away. But the weird thing was, we could hear the ice cracking. We heard huge deep cracking noises which is a bit unsettling. But then again, the glaciers are always moving.
I am not really sure, but either yesterday, today, or tomorrow, will mark our one year of traveling around Australia and New Zealand. I am not sure exactly sure which date it is because of the time zone differences. You see, we left on Feb. 5th but got to Australia on Feb 7th. So when exactly marks the one year anniversary? I figure we’ll just celebrate all 3 days, or, for the purposes of this blog we will choose the middle day in New Zealand. We have had many great adventures and hopefully many more before our return.
This is us one year ago in Sydney, Australia. (our first picture we took when we left)
And here we are now in Okarito, New Zealand. (the last picture we’ve taken thus far)
The Roberts Track at the Franz Josef glacier was the last of the glacier viewing tracks that we had left to conquer. This track was fairly long and we tackled it on a slightly overcast day. We ran into a little rain but it was not too bad. We had heard great things about this track, but it has been closed for quite some time (years to be exact…). It was a really amazing hike with a fantastic view of the glacier at the end.
This first picture was toward the beginning of the trail. I used a long exposure and set up the tripod right in the middle of the stream to get this shot.
Like I said…. It had great views of the glacier.
I give you this for a little bit of perspective. The red circle is actually marking a glacier hiking tour group of about 15-20 people. Yeah, this thing is not small.
