Who spilt the food colouring?

Day 12 Hokitika to Franz Josef

We were on the road by 8am, banking on beating the rain that was steadily closing in on the coast. Arriving at Hokitika Gorge by 8.30am we pretty much had the place to ourselves.

In one review K had read, they said "who spilt the food colouring?" which was spot on. The strong aqua turquoise colour of the water is something we'd never seen before, and we learnt that it's created by glacier "flour", a fine silt-like sediment from the grinding of rocks by glaciers.

After a nice forest walk crossing some bridges with great views we made it back to the car to start driving south before the rain hit.

We pulled into the village of Franz Josef at lunchtime in the pouring rain, where we went into the closest place for lunch to find it packed with tourists doing the same thing as us, rain at a glacier village leaves everyone with very limited options for the day.

We had booked a helicopter flight over the Franz Josef glacier, Fox Glacier and Mt. Cook for 12:30pm the next day. It wasn't looking promising but they said the call on whether to cancel wouldn't be made until half an hour before the scheduled flight.

The rain stopped for a while in the afternoon so M decided to walk to the glacier viewpoint. He returned saying he couldn't see much as low level clouds and rain obscured the view. K was pleased she'd decided to stay in front of the heater.