Franz Josef

On our first day there we went for a walk to Lake Wombat which was very peaceful and still. We met a disarmingly friendly family from Kentucky sitting by the lake and we talked to them for about half an hour before moving on.

The next day we hiked up the Franz Josef glacier, which was pretty amazing. The most challenging part of the day was trying to get the hiking boots and the special spikey attachments (don´t know the technical term) on to my feet. I was given size 9 spikey attachments instead of size 6 and wondered for sometime why I seemed to be having more trouble than anyone else. In the rushed confusion that followed, I left my mittens ( an essential item) down at the bottom of the glacier. I decided that rushing down the ice to get them, and spending a while trying to locate them, camouflaged on the rocks, and then rushing back up the glacier to join my group was worth the risk, as it would have been miserable without them. The group made quite slow progress up the glacier because it was sunny and the ice was melting. So about every 5 steps, the leader used his pick-axe to hack at the ice, making it safer to walk on.

The glacier was more beautiful to look at when up close and climbing through, and on top of it. A lot of the time it appeared blue, which is doesn´t from afar. At the top of the climb we were walking through clouds which felt a bit strange. Some parts of the glacier were really difficult to get through. A few icy corridors we passed through were so narrow it was almost impossible to squeaze through. We had to shuffle with one foot in front of the other (and if you have anything resembling hips, this is a lot easier said than done). The ice and snow in these narrow areas was softer and more unstable than at other points, so at one stage I was actually moving backwards instead of making progress forward, to get out of the tiny gap as fast as possible, which was a little overwhelming. Being caved in by high walls of ice can be somewhat claustrophobic. The group all made it down in one piece except for one guy who left a small chunk of his leg behind, which he had managed to chip out with one of the spikes on his own boots. Nasty! Also, Briony needed a piss so bad by the end of the day on the ice, that her bladder has actaully weakened. But it was not really possible to go to the toilet on the glacier!