Eco-lodges and glaciers

After four days of tramping huts, maybe a little luxury is permitted. So driving north from Queenstown we stayed at Lake Moeraki on the west coast at this lodge. This gentleman, from Chicago, the lodge in the background and this picture sums it up really. The lodge had a very beautiful setting, superbly comfortable rooms and top grade cuisine. Sarah and I lowered the average age of the clientele - all six apart from us - quite considerably. But they were all game and Robert in this picture was not alone in taking a pre-breakfast kayak trip to see the wildlife.

As you can see he had Sarah and me for company and there were others. The evening before we'd been feeding eels - see below.

But then we were off up the west coast. This is very quiet, and a very remote part of NZ. We stopped at Lake Mathieson by the Fox Glacier. This is a mirror lake below Mount Cook in the Southern Alps. That's Mt Cook in the background - NZ's highest mountain. (The reflection's better when there's no wind.)

There are no end of companies offering trips up the glaciers - Fox and Franz Josef - on foot, by helicopter, and by plane. On the recommendation of Robert we went for the plane. Here it is, with its pilot, Steve Miller, the owner of Mount Cook Ski-Planes.

This is Mount Tasman - looking rather close (no closer than 2,000 feet the pilot assured us when we asked on the ground later)...

...and here are the glaciers, Fox and Franz Josef respectively.

The flight went over the divide in the Southern Alps as well and we looked over into the eastern side of New Zealand.

One of the things these pictures don't show is the flatness of the coastal plain, and how abruptly the mountains rise. We asked Steve about this, and he explained that the coastal plain on which we were standing was on one tectonic plate - the Indo- Australian plate. The mountains however were on the Pacific plate, being formed as the Indo-Australian plate slides under the other. It's a very odd realisation, to know you can see two plates at once, so close. And I find it all the more remarkable when I remember (from our visit to Te Papa on Tuesday last week) that the Pacific plate is also sliding northwards at more than one metre every twenty five years.