This morning we left the house to go back to the helicopter tour place. The weather was so much better than yesterday, it was fairly warm in the sun, nothing but clear blue skies and barely any wind. Looks like a great day for a helicopter ride!
We went to the helitour place, prepared our gear that we organised from yesterday and got into groups as designated by the tour company to balance out the weight in the helicopter. Anthony, Amy and I were in one helicopter with some other tourists and the rest of the guys were in another one.
The tour company were really good, they even told the tour guides on the ice that we were all one group so we could switch around once we arrived. The first group made their way to the helicopter area, Rob was a little nervous but it sounded like he did pretty well. The helicopter needed to take them out to the glacier then come back to pick us up so we had about a 20 minute wait.
Before long we made our way to the landing area and we got to feel the powerful wind generated by the helicopter as it touched down right in front of us. They are pretty incredible machines! We followed our instructions, got on board and put our seat belts and headphones on while our pilot Sir Douglass lifted off. I’ve never been in a helicopter before, it was pretty cool!
After a nice smooth climb we flew for about 10 minutes or so and we were over the glacier. It was a pretty awesome view from the helicopter. There was supposedly a helicopter landing area on the ice but you wouldn’t know it by looking at it. We landed and got out of the helicopter straight on to the ice. It was pretty slippery but we managed to get down a little ridge, crouch down and cover our eyes as the helicopter loaded up with the previous group and took off. As it left it blew a lot of wind and small pieces of ice in all directions.
Once the helicopter had left we met our tour guides and switched our groups around. Our guides then helped us get our crampons on (which are the steel spikes for the bottom of our boots). Once we were all ready we started walking around to get a feel for what it’s like. The ground beneath us was not soft snow, it was ice! It was a little broken up but without the crampons it would be really tough, especially because it was not flat at all and walking up or down a slippery ice slope did not feel natural at all!
We started getting the hang of walking around and our tour guide said she would provide some more challenging bits for us to walk soon. The instructions were also to walk in a single file as she could find the safest path through the ice and as long as we didn’t stray from the path we wouldn’t have any troubles getting through it. She carried a pretty big pickaxe to cut steps out of some of the more tough ridges to make it a little easier for us.
Along the ice were little streams of water that would eventually freeze up and create tiny ice tunnels. It was like a flat sheet of glass with a stream of running water underneath it, it looked awesome! We eventually found some holes in the ice which our tour guide found safe, sturdy paths around. As we got closer she asked us to stand still and just listen as you could hear gushing water underneath the ice. She also smashed some ice down the hole so we could hear just how far the drop was.
As we continued across the glacier we came across a big opening in the ice and our guide asked us to hang back on the flat area as she went ahead and cut us some steps and drilled some posts into the ice for a hand rail. It sounds like we had it pretty easy, but even with these things my city legs still found it pretty challenging! The advice was to not side step down ridges and slopes but to keep your toes facing toward because even if the step is not wide enough to fit your foot this way, it makes it harder to roll an ankle and the crampons will do a pretty good job of keeping traction as long as you dig them in to the ice enough.
Once we made it down into the cave, it looked so different. One of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. The ice was no longer white and broken up, instead it was like blue tinted, transparent and thick glass! The floor and walls were all naturally curved by the running water that formed a stream running along the floor of the cave. We got incredibly lucky with this cave because it just tall enough for us to crawl through without having get on all fours and just a few days ago it would have been much smaller and the only way would have been to lie down and slide through. It was amazing to see and hear this amazing natural phenomenon in person! Once we crawled through, we were able to climb out the other side. Unfortunately the steps were pretty tall and as I propelled myself out of the cave I felt my heel problem immediately return. That cave was amazing and I’m glad I did it but I was pretty worried I’d be limping for the rest of the holiday. Walking around on the uneven ground was not the most pleasant experience after that, but I just took it easy from then on.
We did a bit more hiking around and our guide showed us some fairly deep cravasses and cracks in the ice, some more streams with a frozen over sheet of ice covering the flow of water and took us to some really clear, almost illuminated pools of water where we could fill our drink bottles. It was really nice, clean water and stayed cold for a long time! It was actually really cold dipping our hands in there to fill the bottles!
We got back to the helipad and got into our original groups again. The first group boarded the helicopter and headed back while we waited.
Because we had about 20 minutes to wait again, we switched tour guides and he took us out to another hole in the ice. He went down the hole first and dug is pickaxe into the ice so the handle formed a makeshift barrier. He said it is fairly strong but it’s actually more of a mental barrier for people to not go too far or get freaked out by the empty abyss further down. He then instructed each of us to go down the path one by one and take a look. I didn’t do this bit because I wanted to give my ankle a break but it did look pretty cool.
We made our way back to the helipad, took our crampons off and got into position for the helicopter to arrive. Our pilot picked us up and took us a bit closer to the mountain to see if there were any visible land slides which apparently happen really frequently around there.
We finally got back and met up with the other group. Because we wanted to pay separately we had to drive to the office in town near where we had lunch yesterday instead of just letting the company charge Amy’s credit card that was used for the deposit.
We got back into town and found the hidden path to their office, it was a little hard to spot between the trees from the car park! Then we went back to that same restaurant for lunch. We were all pretty hungry after our glacier adventure and I ended up eating a pretty big pizza to myself.
From here we went back the way we came but this time to continue all the way to Christchurch. Just as we went past the town where we had dinner we were talking about that Fruju Tropical Snow ice cream and remember it was still in the freezer at the house! After all that we still didn’t get to try it so we pulled over and I ran in to that same shop and bought a few of them for the people in our car. After all the hype, it was actually pretty good. Anthony described it as “it’s like a winter party in your mouth and every tropical fruit is invited!“. I can tick that off the list now.
After a decent drive we finally arrived in Christchurch and checked in to our hotel. One of the guys that Anthony worked with (and I met at RailsCamp) recently moved back to New Zealand so we planned to catchup for dinner. As we made our way into the city there were witches hats everywhere! None of us have ever seem so many in one place and after we looked it up, it turns out after the earthquake disaster the city bought quite a lot! They were definitely put to good use because even all these years later, there is a lot of construction work happening everywhere.
We got to our hotel, checked in, dropped off our stuff and jumped back in the car to meet the others at Burger Fuel. We’ve basically just had burgers and Japanese food on this trip - they seem to be the favourites! Burger Fuel wasn’t too bad, they had some interesting flavours. I had a burger with beef, avocado, mango and beetroot relish. It was pretty good. The other thing that I hadn’t seen before was a “doofer dispenser”. I had to ask what it was and the lady at the counter showed me. It’s basically a bit of cardboard that folds up in such a way that you can use it to hold your burger and catch all the stuff that falls out and stop your hands from getting dirty. I gave it a try but I don’t think it worked very well.
From there we did a bit of a walk around Christchurch with our local tour guide friends. We walked through the town center and learned about the earthquake’s devastation. There are still a lot of semi broken buildings around including an old church with some parts missing. In the middle of town there is a memorial with white chairs, each one representing a victim that passed away as a result. There was one section of shops that had completely fallen down and killed some people in the process, it had since been replaced by a whole bunch of shipping containers that had been converted into shops. They actually look really good and until someone pointed out that they were shipping containers I wouldn’t have noticed, it actually looked pretty up market! We got to the war memorial bridge and the guys played a few games of table tennis. They have some permanent, concrete table tennis tables installed in the middle of the paved area and there were even bats and a ball. I couldn’t help but think if that were Melbourne someone would have stolen them. Apparently the whole township really bonded through the catastrophe and everyone really worked hard to help each other out which is nice to hear.
We walked back through a park and then drove back to our hotel to leave the next day. We had to get up at a decent time to drop off the car and get to the airport in time for our flight to Wellington.