New Zealand Is Just A Bigger Better Version Of Wales - Franz Joseph, New Zealand

A wake up call of The Saved By The Bell Theme Tune was a decent way to start the day, one of the girls in our room had this as one of her funky alarms along with a room tune that was created that night. The rain appeared to have stopped but we still weren't sure the glacier trip was going to go ahead because of the swollen river making crossing it difficult.

As soon as we were set to leave it chucked it down and we got soaked just walking to the Glacier Centre. After half an hour of continuous rain we were convinced we would have a lazy day but as yet we were told they were waiting to see if we could go on the trip. Then a little bit later we were told the trip was on, to our delight, we proceeded to get suited and booted before heading to the bus taking us the 6km to the base.

We walked down a path which had a few water hazards, surprisingly. It led us to a large stony area where the glacier used to be before it retreated over the years. It then took quite a while to walk to the base of the glacier over stony ground and wading through a couple of small but quite powerful rivers. The glacier was just stunning and so large right up close. We put our crampons on and were split up into three groups for different paces but in all honesty it was just to get smaller groups climbing up. Our leader/guide then came down from the point he was on the glacier, as some of the team were still working at cutting a route down because all the rain over the last few days had destroyed the old path. Climbing up the first part of the glacier was pretty steep and hard going but once this was over it wasn't too steep and the steps cut out were generally easy to climb given the crampons grip was amazing. The views of the glacier and surrounding waterfalls were stunning all the way up . We stopped of at a little ice cave on the way up to take photos, get a bit of lunch and allow the team to finish completion of our route down. We also saw quite a few of though pesky Kia, Chris Allsopp I'm sure can tell you all about them. My favourite part of the whole walk was a decent into an ice crevasse we pretty much climbed down a rope to get into it, this lead us down and was a new path that the team cut and even our guide seemed pretty happy with it.

After a dip in the hot tub straight after the walk we sat around playing a few card games with our roomates here and from “The Poo Pub” and had an earlier night.