Wednesday 11 March 2026 – As is becoming a common pattern in this trip, a short journey from one accommodation to the next turned out to be rather less dull – in a good way – than the simple journey of a couple of hours it might have been had Jane not done her usual thing of finding Things To Do En Route.
What we had to achieve was to get from Franz Josef to Lake Moeraki, a journey of just over 100km. Since the journey passes by the neighbouring Fox Glacier, Jane suggested that we should investigate a couple of viewpoints that present themselves on Google Maps. Although the distance between the Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers can be as little as five kilometres up in the mountains, it’s about 25km by road from one township to the other; as usual, quite a scenic drive.
The Fox Glacier township is even smaller than Franz Josef.
There is a Fox Glacier viewpoint marked on the maps; counter-intuitively, one drives 10km away from the glacier to reach it, but, distant as it is, it does offer a decent view of the glacier.
It also offers a fine view of a sweep of the southern alps, and a thoughtful person has installed a sighting device to help you identify what you’re looking at.
In theory, one can see Mounts Cook, Tasman, Dampier and Teichelmann (or, to give them their Māori names Aoraki, Rarkiroa, Rakiroa and Rakirua), but the weather was against us that day. As well as the sighting device, the site has an installation called “The Canoe of the Gods”.
An info board explains how this pays tribute to the myth of the creation of the mountains, which are named after four brothers whose canoe capsized and created the South Island.
We called in back at the township for a coffee and (in Jane’s case) a vast cheese scone (of which someone else ate half – Ed) at the excellent Cafe Nevé, and then carried on to the next viewpoint possibility, which is reached by a walk starting at a car park just outside town. The walk goes by the south side of the Fox River
along a well-made path. (It’s robust enough that one could drive up it and save all that energy; but that’s not allowed, and I’m rather glad, as it’s a pleasant walk. I was careful to walk in a butch kind of way, as I wanted to avoid the Fox Glacier mince.)
It’s exceedingly rainforesty – probably the most rainforesty rainforest we’ve yet walked in this trip.
We saw this sign
which indicates something I’m hoping for back in the UK. The temptation to see how warm the actual spring was by sticking a hand in evaporated somewhat on looking more closely at it.
The path leads gently uphill for about three km to a couple of viewpoints for the glacier, the first of which allows me to indulge in some photographic nerdery, because the light conditions were quite challenging – very dark foreground and bright background.
I had the Nikon with me as well as my phone. Taking photos with the Nikon requires care – it would be easy to overexpose the bright parts, and once those highlights have been clipped they cannot be recovered. So the trick is to turn the exposure down so that the highlights are not lost. It is possible to do this on the phone, but it requires special buggering about which I can’t be bothered with. So I just pointed the phone at the scene to see how its software dealt with the conditions. Here are the results.
The phone’s Gallery app has its own processing capabilities and so I tweaked the phone image using the “Light Balance” slider. And, once I got to my laptop, I processed the Nikon RAW image using DxO Photolab. Again, here are the results.
As ever, a certain amount of personal taste comes into this, but the Nikon image unsurprisingly has a lot more detail in it and I think looks a lot less garish. But putting the processed Nikon image next to the unprocessed phone image shows what a good job a modern software can do to improve phone images.
The path carries on from this viewpoint to another one where That Chap is on duty again to make sure you don’t do anything you might regret.
The view was fine enough
but Jane spotted that the clouds were moving leftwards so we waited a few minutes and – lo and behold!
we got a cracking photo of the glacier and the mountains beyond.
Much of the time we were there was accompanied by the soundtrack of helicopters whizzing about, and I wanted to wait to get the perfect shot of a helicopter against the glacier. So we waited and listened for a helicopter. Finally, one came along and flew by the glacier, as I wanted. You can see it in this photo.
Oh, yes you can.
I think that gives a great insight into the deceptively huge scale of the glacier.
Rather than just walk back along the path to the car park, we took a small diversion along what was signposted as a “Moraine Path”. This was even more rainforesty.
It was a delightful diversion, including taking photos of the tiniest mushrooms you ever did see, which were growing out of a tree.
The path was quite up-and-downy for a while, but then offered the pleasing illusion of being part of a narrow gauge railway track.
It was a very enjoyable walk, but now it was time to head to Lake Moeraki, and our next destination, the Wilderness Lodge there. The weather had closed in a bit by then, and the landscapes on the drive were quite dramatic in places.
The Lodge is basically in the middle of nowhere – the nearest town is Haast, some 33km away.
It has cabins for guests
many of which, like ours, have a lovely view over the Moeraki River.
The lounges are very comfortable
and, as we discovered later, the food is excellent. But before we ate, we joined a guided tour organised by the Lodge, to explore a bit of the local area. Jack, our guide, explained a little bit about the unique nature of the environment. Lake Moeraki is near the west coast, but most of the bits north of it have been exploited in some way – what was forest is interspersed with farmland, which has changed the nature of the nature in it. But the Lake Moeraki area has never been exploited, and so is closer to what it was once originally.
The six of us were enjoined to don welly boots and Jack led us across the Munro Creek
and along a path where he explained about some of the trees we could see.
- The Silver Beech, particularly one as old as this one, is a rare tree these days. It’s slow growing and doesn’t bear fruit – it reproduces via wind-blown pollen and seeds. The last ice age, 12,000 years ago, did for them and since that time other, faster growing trees have tended to dominate in the rainforest.
- An example would be the White Pine, which is not a pine, actually – as any fule kno it is Dacrycarpus Dacrydioides. This particular tree was the basis for some added CGI and use in the film Avatar. It’s a faster-growing fruiting tree, hence being able to compete in the silent, slow war that is a rainforest. (Fruiting is useful – the fruit get eaten by birds, which then distribute the seeds.)
- Finally, Jack asked us to guess the age of the Red Pine, or Rimu tree. To cut a long story short, we were all out by a long way: the one he showed us, not much taller then him, was about 100 years old – surviving by consuming tiny amounts of resource in order to grow.
- He also showed us a mature Rimu, which, having got to the point where it reached the canopy, could compete on more equal terms with the trees around it and grow much faster. This one, like the other mature trees he showed us, is thought to be about 900 years old.
Then Jack took us towards the banks of the Moeraki River where he intended us to see a wildlife cabaret. But first we were distracted by a bit of birdlife – a fantail was flitting about in the trees near us, feasting on the insects we people disturb as we crash through their landscape.
I took many, many photos in an attempt to catch it with its tail doing the fan thing, but only managed to get this.
Not perfect, but you get the idea.
By the banks of the river, we had a view back to the Lodge
and Jack started the cabaret act by rinsing the chunks of meat he had in a container with river water and splashing the rinse water in, before throwing a couple of pieces of the meat into the river. Obligingly, the local denizens started appearing to feed.
and soon there were a lot of them.
These were Longfin Eels, the same species we’d seen in the Wildlife Centre in Hokitika, but living wild in the river. It’s worth emphasising that the eels are in no way dependent on this feeding, but they’re happy to join in if the food happens to be there.
Guide included for scale
Drinks and dinner followed our return to the Lodge and, well fed up and agreeably drunk, we retired for the night. We had no formal activities planned for the next couple of days – a chance to relax, maybe, but my money is on Jane finding Interesting Things for us to Do.
