Tuesday 10 March 2026 – Our short time in Hokitika was pretty damp, and these photos tell you all you need to know about the short drive as we continued down to our next stop, the little town of Franz Josef.

Franz Josef, apart from being the Christian names of Haydn, the famous composer of classical music and inventor of the string quartet, is the name of a famous glacier (so famous that even I had heard of it) and also of the Austrian Emperor Franz Josef I. That the glacier be named after the Emperor was the idea in 1865 of German geologist Julius (or possible Johann, depending on which AI overview you believe) von Haast, who generously gave his own name to a town a little further down the coast. Haast also proposed a name for the neighbouring glacier, the Fox Glacier, so it’s definitely not named after Samantha Fox (Google her name unless you’re in the office). No, the Fox Glacier is named for Sir William Fox, a New Zealand Prime Minister (as opposed to the 14th century MP for York). Some of you might be familiar with Fox’s Glacier Mints and thus beginning to wonder if there’s a connection here, but no; the mints were originally named, by company founder Richard Fox, “Acme Clear Mint Fingers” which may have tripped off an Edwardian tongue but doesn’t really inspire; however his son’s wife suggested the family name plus “Glacier Mints”, thus creating the name we now know and love.

I’m glad I sorted that out for you.

Our accommodation in Franz Josef was the Legacy Te Waonui, which is a little piece of rainforest just on the edge of town.

View from our balcony

I was a bit surprised to find rainforest where I’d expected something a bit more, well, alpine, somehow. We looked around for some mountains

but couldn’t actually see any. What we could see is that the town is tiny, consisting basically of two streets, one of which is composed entirely of accommodation and the other, the main street, is bars, restaurants, a shop and at least half a dozen organisations offering helicopter rides of some sort or another (hence The Road To Heli). We had come for the chopper, as opposed to the chopper coming for us, as the nursery rhyme might have it.

We discovered the above as we’d had some time on our hands, so we’d gone for a walk. Obviously. At the southern edge of the town is the charming little church of Our Lady of the Alps

just outside which we caught, in the distance, a brief sight of a bird that Jane wanted to see,

but this was the best that the photo technology to hand could do. More on this later. We got a slightly higher-quality view of another bird whose call fills the air in these parts,

the New Zealand Bell Bird.

So the mainstream of this exposition – helicopter rides. We had two booked, the first one being a scenic ride, the second a heli-hike. Having seen the weather and its concomitant lack of visibility, we weren’t very sure that these would go ahead, but the morning of our first ride dawned a little clearer (i.e. one could see that there really were mountains hereabouts),

and so we were reasonably sanguine about the chances. We checked in at Glacier Helicopters, which is where our itinerary told us to, and they kindly pointed us at their other office, the Helicopter Line, further down the street, where it was confirmed that (a) they were ready for us and (b) there would be a flight. After checking in and watching the prerequisite safety briefing, we walked out to the helipad across the street to find our copter

and Richard, its pilot. There were six people crammed in for our flight and Jane and I were lucky enough to get a front seat, which definitely gave us the best view of proceedings. As we took off, I was still wondering about how good the actual visibility would be

but Richard clearly knew the way and our glacier gradually became visible.

We flew up the glacier

and touched down near a stick which someone had helpfully stuck in the ice to indicate a landing spot.

We were able to get out and walk around for a few minutes, only ducking slightly when another chopper whizzed by

and got a good eyeful of the plateau at the top of the glacier.

We clambered back in to the helicopter and Richard gave us a tour of the neighbourhood

including the Fox Glacier

as well as other, smaller glaciers that flow into or from the same bowl

before we headed back down to Franz Josef

amid increasing cloud. We learned that ours was the last flight to get away that morning, so, as ever, we’d been lucky with the weather. Not perfectly so: the flight was billed as a “Mount Cook Spectacular” and Mount Cook was hidden by cloud; but all in all it was a great experience.

This left us with a free afternoon, and our peregrinations of the evening before had led us past possibly the only non-helicopter or non-hiking attraction of Franz Josef, the West Coast Wildlife Centre.

One can see kiwi there (they have a hatching support programme similar to the National Kiwi Hatchery we’d seen in Rotorua) and also Tuatara and Little Blue Penguins. A staff member illuminated the kiwi with a red torch so we could see it (as usual and expected, no photography allowed); and we timed our visit such that we could see the feeding of the penguins. There is a pool there where they do the feeding, and the penguins were whizzing about in anticipation of getting a meal.

This angle makes one appreciate the streamlined nature of the penguin

There are about seven penguins there, all rescue animals for some reason or other, typically boat strikes or dog attacks; some of them are missing a flipper

but they were all delighted to be fed. A lass called Sophie came out and explained about the rescue programme, and did some feeding by tossing fish in for the penguins to nab themselves, and also stopping to hand feed some of the more badly injured ones to make sure that they got their meal.

Once the feeding stopped, most of the penguins got out of the water and congregated at one end to get their close-ups.

Very cute!

Our package at the Te Waonui included a free dinner, which we took in the posher of the two  restaurants there, called the Canopy. I wonder why?

It was a five-course meal, and very fine it was, too. Afterwards we went for a walk to settle the meal down, and had a somewhat closer encounter with That Bird that Jane is anxious to see.

Our second day in Franz Josef started very early – another 0530 alarm – as we had to check in for our heli-hike at 0730 and we wanted to make sure we got a breakfast down us first. We kitted ourselves out in the best approximation we could make of gear appropriate for hiking on a glacier (layers of clothing, gloves, hats, decent walking shoes) and made our way to Franz Josef Glacier Guides,

where it soon became apparent that this glacier hiking thing was a bit more serious than that. We checked in and filled in the usual medical disclaimer which said that if we died it was our fault, and joined our group, among which we were the oldest by an estimated two generations! We had to do a miniature assault course – a couple of huge steps up and down without using handrails, to make sure we could cope with that kind of activity Up There, and then our guide, a lovely Norwegian lass called Guri,

got us weighed and kitted out in proper hiking-appropriate boots, jackets and trousers, carrying our crampons in red bags,

and prepared us for what might go wrong – ice fall, rock fall, delay in being picked up, possibly an unscheduled overnight stay on the mountain if the weather really kicked up rough. She then led us to their helipad – a half-kilometre walk, actually – where, unfortunately, she got the news that the weather outlook was for the cloud to come in, so our trip was cancelled.

We both received this news with mixed emotions: disappointment that we wouldn’t be able to do the trip; relief that the concomitant opportunity to make a complete arse of oneself on a mountainside has disappeared; stoicism that of course they had to be safe and couldn’t afford to take the chance. But since today was our last day here, rescheduling was not an option. Ah, well; we’d been pretty lucky everywhere else, and at least we’d had the scenic ride. We felt very sorry for some of the young things in our group, though, who had been eagerly anticipating their first-ever helicopter ride.

Having taken coffee, we walked past a display in the town which showed a photo from 1905 of Edwardian folk doing the glacier hiking thing.

At first I wondered how the hell they got up to the glacier, but then realised that in those days it probably reached right down the mountain so one could more easily scramble up to it (and the surroundings in the photo bear that out). There was also a photo of something we’d missed out on, which is an ice cave visit

and I think those folks are rather better kitted out than the ladies and gents in the photo above it.

Further walking around the town gave us the chance to get a better photo of a Tui

and also of another local phenomenon.

The New Zealand Marmite, we’d seen before, and, having heard the Men At Work song, we knew about Vegemite; we think Promite is a New Zealand version of Vegemite, but we weren’t prepared to buy some to find out. Well, not at first, anyway.

This left us with time on our hands, and, in recognition of the early start we decided to console ourselves by getting some rest, in order to recover before going for a walk. Obviously. The walk that Jane had picked out started after a short drive out of town to the Franz Josef car park. From there the original plan had been to do the Sentinel Rock trail with half an eye on the possibility of being able to take a picture of That Bird, the one we’d failed to get a decent photo of the evening before. So, I attached the Big Lens to the Big Camera and we set off for the car park. We discovered that, as well as Sentinel Rock, one could walk up to a viewpoint for the Franz Josef Glacier, so we decided to do both. The local birds, having seen me attach the Big Lens, all either fell utterly silent or buggered off en masse. I heard one bell bird the entire time we were walking, and I think it’s tone was somewhat mocking.

The walk to Sentinel Rock is short and quite steep

but the view at the end is worth the climb.

There’s an info board there which gives an idea of how much the glacier has receded (19km from the shore that it originally reached) and also shows that the Edwardian ladies and gents could quite easily have walked up to it in 1905.

We doubled back and then headed to the Glacier viewpoint. It’s reasonably clear where it is when you get there.

The view is majestic, but not quite as exciting as the one you get from a helicopter zooming up it.

On the way back to the car, Jane spotted this rather lovely example of a “fiddlehead” – the unfurling new frond of a fern.

Back in the town I decided that we should buy some Promite after all, so we popped into the shop to get some. Heading back to the car, we heard the distinctive call of That Bird, so Jane went to investigate and excitedly bade me hasten myself over with the Big Lens in hand. So I got the Lens out of the Kia and hurried over and was able to start taking photos of a Kea.

Anyone expecting a brightly coloured bird tends to be disappointed in New Zealand, where most birds are brown so as to camouflage themselves against the endemic predators, falcons or hawks. That’s why these Keas are the colour they are.  However, if you get up close, you can see that there’s a subtle variation, and these Keas, identified as juveniles by the yellow eye-ring which becomes grey in adulthood, were clearly too young to know the rule of bird photography that says you bugger off when a Big Lens comes out. They obligingly came closer and indeed ended up doing something they’re known for, which is disassembling bits of car trim.

Jane was hoping to see the flash of colour on the underside of their wings, and so we spent a certain amount of time and a ridiculous number of shots trying to capture a photo of them in flight. But we got there in the end, thanks to luck, persistence and the excellence of Nikon autofocus.

So, that was it for Franz Josef – a couple of good days, a touch of bad luck with the weather, but an excellent glacier helicopter ride and some successful photography.

The morrow sees us moving further south again (possibly via another glacier view walk) to a lake, so there will probably be more decent shots to view, should you want to come back and take a look.