Tag Archives: Glacier

Franz Josef – The Road To Heli

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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 one was whizzing around in circles, coming up for a breath of air every so often

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.

 

Day 6 – Seals and larks

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Thursday 4 September 2025 – We emerged, blinking, to the wonderful surroundings in Tinayrebukten.

Mirror-smooth, calm water (therefore no wind) and mild temperatures were the order of the day.

Kuba had given the guests an option – a Zodiac cruise or a hike. Even without a deciding factor, I think I would have gone for the cruise, on the basis that hiking in wellies is not that rewarding. But the possibility of seeing puffins sealed the deal, so the cruise it was for us. Kuba was careful to explain that we were past peak puffin season, but he expected there to be some around.

As we started out in the Zodiac, we got a great view back of Kinfish.

Kuba told us that there were harbour seals on the shores near us. As usual for me, I had difficulty picking them out, but patient explaining from Jane and the Big Lens helped; and anyway we got really quite close to them. Kuba counted 13 seals, and they, like the walruses, watched us incuriously as we drifted almost silently by.

It wasn’t exactly difficult to get good close-ups, so photographically these seals weren’t too much of a challenge.  However, I invite captions for this picture:

I don’t know what these seals are thinking, but in my mind it would be with a northern English accent

The folk in the other Zodiac had made land and started their hike.

We kept an eye on them as they worked their way up the hillside.

The glacier at the far end of our fjord had some great light playing over it.

Before long, we spotted our first puffins.

There were a handful on the water, and if we got too close, they took off.  Annoyingly (but unsurprisingly) they tended to fly away from us, which made getting a photo of a puffin flight quite challenging, but after a few hundred attempts I got one halfway decent shot.

I hadn’t appreciated that both puffins and guillemots are species of auk, and the similarities are clear when you see them flying – neither bird takes off or lands elegantly.

We approached a couple of caves,

and the colours of the rock formations in the roof were very striking.

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the fjord, the hiking team were steadily making their way up the hill.

On our side, there was an even steeper hill, and, amazingly, reindeer were cavorting up and down it. See if you can spot one in this picture.

As you can guess, I had difficulty spotting them,

but eventually got the Big Lens to pick them up.

There were probably half a dozen in all, and we watched as they picked their way around the hillside.

On the other side, the hiking team had made it to the ridge at the top of their hill.

They’d been out for an hour by this stage, so had clearly been working quite hard.

Our geology continued to present some wonderful palettes – glacial water, coloured rocks and moss.

We even encountered a ledge which has been christened “the hanging gardens of Tinareybukta”.

Further along the fjord was a glacier, which we went to explore.

You can tell from the blue colour that it’s a fairly active one; blue means fresh ice, which means bits are falling off it.

It was instructional (for me, anyway) to compare the different colours that different cameras saw.  The phone saw the ice as very blue, but my little Sony had a much greener cast. I corrected it a bit, but there’s still a noticeable difference.

Phone

Sony

I think the Sony’s version is a bit truer to the scene as I recall it – but the blue was very striking.  Although the glacier made some rumbling noises, it didn’t oblige us with a calving, so after a while, we made our way back to Kinfish where the crew had prepared a surprise for us:

A barbecue lunch!

Annie, our stewardess, was doing her usual job of making sure we were well looked after,

dispensing a rhubarb-flavoured cocktail to those who wanted it, as well as G&T to the discerning passenger.

After lunch, the boat moved to a different point in the fjord, called Lilliehöökbreen, where we were close to the glacier that was to be the subject of the afternoon’s Zodiac cruise.  It was clear that it was a somewhat more active glacier, as we could see as we looked back at Kinfish.

Lots of brash ice made for interesting progress, but Kuba swore that the Zodiac would be robust enough to withstand it. We approached the active edge of the glacier – it’s very long, some 5km – and maybe as tall as 60m high.

Among the clutter floating about there were some chunks of black ice, i.e. ice containing no air bubbles, thus perfectly clear and almost invisible in the water. Rolf retrieved a very, erm, chunky chunk

bits of which I’m sure will be gracing our G&Ts before long.

Kuba took us as close to the glacier as the brash ice would allow,

which gave us some great scenery.

A 5km glacier cliff sounds wonderful, but it makes trying to be somewhere near a calving rather challenging. We saw a couple of chunks falling off, one of which made a huge splash, but none of these was considerate enough to happen when I (or anyone) was pointing a camera in its direction. Kind of frustrating, but very much to be expected.  The noise of being near a glacier like this is amazing – every so often there’s a “boom!” as something somewhere collapses; and a few minutes later a wave reaches you in the brash ice.

The colour of some of the icebergs was simply fantastic.

I promise I haven’t emphasised the blue colour you see when processing the photo.

After an hour or so of failing to witness a calving, we headed back to Kinfish to find that the crew had organised yet another surprise for us – the opportunity to jump into the water again! This time, however, you were allowed to wear the immersion suits that the ship carries for real emergencies – the sort where you have to abandon ship. They’re basically (rather comical, bright orange) drysuits, and many of the guests opted to clamber into them

and be taken out to a convenient berg in the ice archipelago surrounding us

so they could fool around.

Haavard showed that he was rather good at wakeboarding

and a few people had a go at swinging from a rope dangling from the ship’s crane before plunging – more or less elegantly – into the water.

Expedition cruising can be about the wild life as well as the wildlife, it seems.

We ended the day at anchor amid scenery of great beauty

with the prospect of a night’s sleep undisturbed by pitching, rolling or creaking.

Tomorrow’s excursion should be a mine of interesting information. Stay tuned to find out more!

Day 3 – White Out

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Monday 1 September 2025 – We mere mortals had no internet whilst we were in the pack ice, but the boat did have a limited connectivity for the crew’s use. Kuba used it to check that our destination had no forecast problems with wind or swell.  We had a long way to go, to get to the easternmost island in the archipelago, Kvitøya – the White Island.

In order to save bandwidth, though, he didn’t check the several hundred nautical miles of sea between our amazingly calm patch and our destination. This, it turned out, was not calm sailing.  In Kuba’s defence, there wasn’t anything he could have done about it – we had to cross it, whatever – but I think he felt a bit bad that he hadn’t checked it out so he could at least warn us.

So, it was a noisy night in our cabin.  In calm conditions, we get engine noise and the sound of the sea outside our porthole.  If there is swell, the cabin creaks really quite loudly as, I suppose, it flexes with the boat. I found the noise interrupted my sleep somewhat, but the motion of the boat, which was mainly pitching, didn’t seem too bad as I lay in my bed. On trying to get up for the morning’s ablutions, though, it was clear that it was a heavy swell.  Taking a shower involved clutching on to the handrails thoughtfully provided for the purpose, and was best done quickly, rather than thoroughly. But we both managed to get ourselves cleaned up and headed up to breakfast.

Which was eerily quiet.  Quite a lot of the guests, and even some of the crew, had been taken quite badly seasick. One of the Italian lasses, bless her, was really, really ill, so the night must have been wretched for her.

It was going to take all morning to reach Kvitøya, so people settled down to deal with the swell as best they could. I spent the morning reliving and writing up our fantastic, fantastic polar bear encounter of the day before, only now and then having to be careful not to be pitched out of my chair in the bar as the boat rolled.

The activity planned for the day was a Zodiac cruise off the east coast of the island, and thus it was at 2pm that we set out, into the much calmer waters that Kuba had expected.  It was a bit chilly and windy – maybe a couple of degrees above freezing – but otherwise a civilised environment for an outing.

Kvitøya is a very flat island, almost entirely covered in a single glacier.

Technically, the island is a desert – there is no vegetation.  The bits that are not glacier are rock. Nonetheless, it is home to some polar bears, who have learned to fast during the summer before going out on to the winter ice to stock up on seals in preparation for the following summer fast (as opposed to the one we saw yesterday, who had clearly been able to find enough food to sustain him through the summer’s wandering over the pack ice).

There was, therefore, a possibility that we might see a bear.  It was more likely that we would see walruses, though, and see them we did, on the rocky shores of the island.

Some of them were just sleeping.

Others were doing the jockeying for position thing that we saw in Smeerenburg.

Some were in the water, as well.

As we were watching, as if acting on a signal, those on one of the rocky outcrops suddenly dashed into the water.

At first we wondered whether they had panicked at something, but then it became clear that they were curious about us in our Zodiacs, as they were heading our way. Kuba said that, because very few, if any, other boats will have visited so far east, it was possible that we were the first humans they’d seen for a while, so they were curious.

One of them had lost a tusk, somehow, as Jane’s photo shows.

There are regulations about the minimum distance that one must keep away from wildlife, so we retreated somewhat.  This was partly due to the regulations, and also partly because walruses are much faster and more agile in the water than on land, and might even be aggressive; Kuba has heard of instances of Zodiacs being punctured in walrus encounters.

We cruised around a headland, and a fogbow – a double fogbow, egad! – developed.

We went to check out an iceberg that was nearby,

and I got the chance to try out some more artistic angles for photography.

There being no visible polar bear, but rather increasing fog, after about 90 minutes we headed back to Kinfish, back past the walruses.  I was pleased to get one shot of them which included a calf

which you can see is a dark colour and, of course, has yet to grow the tusks that would appear as it matured.

During the late afternoon and evening, the skipper took Kinfish to the north coast; there was talk of seeking out a monument to Salomon August Andrée, the Swedish balloon pilot who perished in an attempt to fly over the north pole. It was an untested, virtually unsteerable, somewhat leaky hydrogen balloon, but Andrée persisted anyway, taking off from Svalbard in July 1897. Imagine his surprise! when the balloon crashed, after only two days. It landed on pack ice, and he and the two accompanying him, Knut Frænkel and Nils Strindberg, although unhurt, faced a horrendous journey on foot to safety. They didn’t make it, but ended up, exhausted, on Kvitøya, the most remote and least hospitable island in the Svalbard archipelago, where they established a camp (which wasn’t discovered until 1930). They eventually died there. At the time, this exploit was fêted in Sweden as a matter of patriotic pride, but through the lens of time he is now regarded less favourably. He was an idiot, even more than Shackleton, who was bad enough, God knows; but at least Shackleton rescued his men.

We never reached the monument, apart from anything else because we had a couple of wildlife encounters.  Firstly, Jesper saw a walrus on an ice floe.  As we gently crept towards it, we could make it out more clearly.

It was actually a mother nursing her calf, something that Kuba said he’d never witnessed before.  As we drifted past, the mother and calf eyed us incuriously

but then went back to the more serious business.

The other encounter was courtesy of the eagle-eyed Gunnar, who saw something on the shore that he said was a bear and others thought was maybe a rock.

I was on the bridge at the time, and so used the Big Lens, which showed that

Gunnar was right.

Again, Jesper steered us cautiously towards the bear. We were – literally – in uncharted waters, and he used the boat’s systems to contribute to the world’s understanding of the bay.

You can see the course he plotted to get us as close to the bear as was allowed by Norwegian regulations – 300 metres. This enabled me to get this photo of the bear sleeping peacefully on a nest of seaweed.

I suppose I should be pleased, but the shot above is an illusion, really.  I have heavily cropped into the image further above, which was the real scene, as taken at the furthest reach of my 560mm lens. With the naked eye, one could make out the bear, but little else – binoculars were needed to understand any detail.

[Photographic nerd rant alert]

I can understand the desire to keep wildlife, and particularly a species with a declining population like polar bears, well away from interaction with toxic humanity, but I have to say that, from the point of view of a photographer, the Norwegian regulations – minimum distance 300m – remove much of the joy from such an encounter. The Big Lens has a 560mm focal length, making it the equivalent of about a 12 or 13X magnification telescope, and the photo I got could not be printed bigger than 6″ x 4″ – not even a postcard home, really. That’s what £3,000 of photo kit can manage. To get significantly better would cost an extra couple of grand. OK, I appreciate that I was privileged even to see the bear, but I am one of the sad band of people for whom if something can’t be photographed, it might as well never have happened.

[End of rant]

How come we could get so close to the polar bear yesterday?  As I explained then, it is because we were in international waters, where these Norwegian restrictions don’t apply, and it’s down to individual captains and guides as to what is safe both for wildlife and humans. I’m still fizzing with joy about the great encounter we had yesterday.  If my interactions with polar bears had been limited to today’s distances, I would have been bitterly disappointed. It makes me doubly grateful to the captain, crew and guides, as well as to the gods of chance, to have had yesterday’s opportunity.

Tomorrow, we head south west, past the longest glacier cliff edge in northern Europe. Should be exciting!