Not the most exciting day. We left Greymouth and as usual we hit the grocery store on the way out of town. We had booked the 2:30 heli hike tour on Franz Josef Glacier yesterday so we needed to be in Franz Josef by about noon.
We drove down the coast. The next town down from Greymouth is Hokitika so we stopped there for breakfast. Rick had coffee in a small town restaurant. Across the street was the Carnegie Library. We asked who Carnegie was and, somewhat surprisingly, it turned out to be Andrew Carnegie. In his time he funded libraries all over the world, including in New Zealand.
After breakfast we went to a pounamu shop. Pounamu or New Zealand greenstone is found in this area. It was highly valued by the Maori people for making tools. They had a lot of beautiful pieces including a 4 inch statue that we really liked. We asked the price and it was about $3,500. Needless to say, it won’t be coming home with us.
We left Hokitika and continued on our way. We had not made specific plan for the North Island portion of our trip. We like the campervan life so much we tried to find one for our time on the North Island, but at this late date we couldn’t seem to find a thing. Over the past couple of days we had sent out a couple of emails to van brokers. One of them called while we were driving. She had a van just like the one we have now available for pickup in Auckland! We told her we would take it!
We arrived in Franz Josef around noon and checked in at the heli hike company. They monitor the weather very closely and cancel the flight if the weather doesn’t look good. As of noon we were still on so we had some lunch and went back to the checkin site. We were given a number and sent into the “boot room”. About a half hour before we were scheduled to take off the flight was canceled. We weren’t surprised because other companies in the area were also canceling flights. We were disappointed. The heli hike was going to be one of the highlights of our trip. They were willing to reschedule us for following day, but the weather didn’t look much better. We decided we would spend the night a little further south so we got back in the camper and drove south. We have been consistently staying at Top10 Holiday Parks and the next park was in Fox Glacier.
I asked about heli hikes on Fox Glacier and they had two openings on the 7:50am flights, so we figured we’d take them. If we get to go up fantastic, if it’s raining as forecasted nothing lost. We will see what happens tomorrow.