2/3/2012

There is a local shuttle bus service in Fox Glacier run by a guy called Murray. Having no car, I needed transport out to Lake Matheson. So he drove me from there. I also told him that I’d like to go to see the Fox Glacier, so he said he’d do both trips for a price of 20 NZD. At Lake Matheson, there’s a 1hour 30minutes walk you can do around the lake and on a clear day, you can get glorious views of Mt. Cook and Mt. Tasman reflected in the lake. Today wasn’t the day for that though. It was lovely weather but there was a lot of low lying cloud over the mountain peaks so it obscured the view. In 2005, when I was with a friend of mine here, we did the walk and got a lovely photo of Mt. Cook reflected like a mirror in the lake.

There was a Dutch couple with their New Zealand friend who I got talking to on the walk. The Dutch couple were over visiting the New Zealand woman for the second time. The New Zealand woman was lovely. Her ancestors are the La Touche family who had a manor in Greystones, Co. Wicklow, Ireland. She said that there was money in the family back then but she didn’t know where the hell the money had gone since!

The start and end of the track was at the Matheson Café and as I took my cup of tea outside, I bumped into an English couple who I met at National Park Village. It was great to meet up with them again. They had been to Mt. Cook, where I was heading to soon and it was great to get the tips from them as to what it was like. Murray picked me up in the bus and I asked him if he could also take me out to Gillespie’s Beach, which was another 20 km away. He said that he had to pick up people in the next hour or two so he didn’t have the time to bring me out there. I’d heard from a couple who I’d met in Hokitika, that Gillespie’s Beach has a lot of driftwood on it and it would have been a good photo opportunity to get out to see it. But I had to “give up the ghost” on it.