South Island Trip, Day 10:
After packing up camp in Okuru and narrowly mising getting rained on while eatin breakfast, we loaded onto the bus to drive on "one of Lonely Planet's top 10 drives in the world." TODAY was the day that I finally got to go walk on a glacier.... and yes, you are right. I would finally get to wear crampons!!!! The whole bus ride it was kind of overcast, but the beauty of the Southern Alps could not be masked. Upon arrival in Fox, most of headed over to the guided glacial walk building and got outfitted in hiking boots, transportable crampons, and a water proof. Our guide was a lovable nature loving kiwi, and for a smallish young lady, she could definitely hack away at the glacial ice! The hike itself consisted on climbing up over 790 steps, in what seemed like rain forest. We took some brakes to keep the group together, and got to cup our hands under a mountain waterfall and drink the pure Fox glacial waters of the south island.
After we had navigated most of the steps, we had to climb up a latter and then shimmy (while holding onto a chain connected to the cliff face with one hand the whole time) around a narrow ledge of doom. Having then strapped on our adventurous crampons, we took to the ice... and amusing photos prevailed.
Having conquered Fox glacier, we piled back onto the bus and drove extra long (as we had narrowly just escaped terential down pour at the glacier---something that the whole of the south island is well known for) and paid an extra $5 to sleep in real beds (with real pillows-- not my balled up sweatshirt and jeans in a plastic bag) in the 3 person town of Pukekura (or as the three locals lovingly call it, Puke, but pronounced like puket)! No sooner had we pulled the bus into the drive way than a rugged man named Pete jumped on in his awesome combonation of short shorts and an Australian leather hat and told us that "if yur looking for those fancy mocha-whatevers, you ain't gonna find them 'round these parts." Puke was a great town, and we were all very impressed by the fact that for a three person town, they had their own Pub (called what else but the Puke Pub). The next morning, we crossed the street and went on a tour of the other building in town--- the Bushman's Museum. It was great! For the reasonable price of four dollars, we got to get inside out of the terential down pour and enjoy an informative home-made movie about Pete's former profession of jumping out of helicopters to capture wild deer to fill the deer farms with! But that by no means was the end of the entertainment--- no SIR! We then got to tour the rest of the museum, stopping to look and feed cereal to the two live possums in a giant cage and pondering what kind of expression was really on that stuffed stoat's face? The whole experience was capped off with the chance to sink our teeth into the Bushman's town defining delicacy--- Possum Pie. While some may think that the fact most of us had just fed the two possums in a cage cereal would put us off the idea of enjoying one of their relatives in a warm pie, it did not! I figures that for the red hot deal of $4, how could I NOT eat possum!?
(a word of explaination: the picture of the scarey looking man sitting on a toliet pointing a shot gun at us, well that was a gigantic picture of the aforementioned Pete in the museum's example of "a bushman's out house.")
