Once more on the move, we left Arrowtown to head for Franz Josef. This was the longest drive of our trip and allowed us to realise that the replacement van was terrible – it had an extremely noisy transmission which had us shouting at each other to be heard, and later out of sheer frustration. I don’t like to dwell on this too much, as I don’t want to spoil our memories of our trip, but this was something we could have done without, for sure. And of course at this point there was no chance to change it again, so we had to just get on with it.
We drove back to the coast and then travelled northwards to Franz Josef. We found an information board which told us that the area we were driving through is part of a UNESCO national park area called Te Wahipounamu which encompasses the fjords and Mount Cook areas to the south as well as the area were driving through on the coast.
The last photo shows another entertainingly narrow bridge we had to cross – this was a regular feature of our drives in New Zealand and B was brilliant at negotiating them while I panicked 😉
Franz Josef is famous for its glacier. However, once there the weather closed in on us again and meant that any attempt to see the glacier was a waste of time – and in any case you are not allowed any closer than 1km away, so hardly ideal in the circumstances. We therefore opted for a wood fired hot tub in the forest instead!
