17th October: Franz Josef

Franz Josef. A glacier with a town attached. The town is given over entirely to servicing the glacier traffic. There are two streets, half a dozen restaurants, whole piles of motels and backpackers and hotels. A single rather small supermarket. At least three companies offering helicopter or plane trips over or onto the ice. The only indoor ice climbing wall in the southern hemisphere. A cinema running loop films about the life cycle of glaciers. Just the one (according to Heather in the YHA anyhow) company leading bunches of clueless numpties up onto the ice from below.
They do a half day, and a full day tour, but from the look of it the half day will let you walk from the car park to the terminal moraine, up over the rubble onto the ice and then turn round for the decent. So I've booked the full day one.
We get a buss to about 3km from the glacier and amp up the rest of the way. Split into three groups, the easy, the moderate and the demanding parties. I've been chatting to a French guy on the way up and we wind up being the oldest and fattest pair in the demanding party. While fatter and older it does seem that we're the best prepared: the only hire kit we've got are crampons and hats, everyone else is wearing tour company jackets, trousers, boots.
It turns out that the one think clothing wise they insist on is 'no jeans', which given that I've three pairs of jeans and a Marks & Spencer suit, means that I'm wearing halfway decent suit trousers under plastic overtrousers.
The Franz Josef Glacier is one of the few that's currently advancing, so there's lots of moraine to cross before reaching ice proper, which is a bit of a struggle wearing crampons. They come into their own once we do bit ice though.
And there's a lot of ice. 11km I'm told. A couple wide. Much of it rather grubby, the pressure of ice causes the surrounding slate mountains to shatter, showering fragments over the outlying ice which is conveyed to the centre. Much of it quite shocking blue. Much of it melting, sending riverlets trickling down the slope - the guides from time to time cut new channels for the meltwater to keep it away from the steps they're cutting.
The route goes through crevasses, up and down ice walls, across plains and through tunnels - this bit will look much better when I've managed to get the pictures off the camera.
In a narrow cutting I find myself almost embarrassingly stuck but wriggle free and I'm able to regain some sense of worth by getting my French friend out of the same state.
A crampon sheers as I go into another crevasse, which proves how much benefit we're getting from them, fortunately Cliff, the lead guide, has met this one before and has a spare, though it needs to be held together by elastoplast.
Up at the top of our trip (the glacier goes on for miles yet) we are visited by kea, an actual vampire parrot! It struts about us for five minutes, happily standing only a few metres away, before eventually launching itself down the mountains and into the trees.
The tour is long. About six hours on the glacier itself, plus the time to get there. By the end I'm shattered. The YHA has a sauna so I retreat into there and soak up the scorching heat before cold and hot showers restore an element of humanity once more.