Franz Josef

Franz Josef is mainly famous for its glacier. The glacier is now 19km inland but it used to go to the sea. In the last 10 years alone it has receded by nearly a kilometre.
To see it at its best we traded in our 4 wheels for blades and went for a helicopter ride! 🚁 We hopped aboard our little machine down in the valley and flew up to the mountains to get a close up look at the Franz Josef glacier and then went on to see Fox Glacier. It was impressive! We also landed at the top of a mountain on the snow, quite fun to be there without any hiking effort! After what seemed like seconds but was actually 35min we landed safely back in town . It took us a bit longer to land emotionally and we had to sit down for a coffee and let the adrenaline and excitement wear off.

Back down to earth we went for a short walk around Franz Josef that involved testing if our shoes were really waterproof, walking through a man made tunnel used to divert water to a gold mining area, which has now became home to a colony of glow worms. We also stumbled across some weird sculptures during our forest walk.

Next day we drove to the nearby town of Fox Glacier and went to see Matheson lake. It is famous for its perfect postcard worthy reflection of the two highest peak of New Zealand: Mount Cook and Mount Tasman. We were not so lucky with the mirror reflection and the clouds but it was an amazing view still. Back to Franz Josef we went for another little walk to see the glacier from the bottom. It was interesting to learn about the history of this glacier and how quickly it is receding due to global warming.

We had an amazing time in Franz Josef and we met really nice people in our campsite which made our dinners even more enjoyable!Read more