Greymouth, Barrytown and glaciers Franz Josef and Fox

Since we had quite a busy and strenous days at Abel Tasman track, we chose to chill out for a bit in a small town of Greymouth on the west coast of the South island. The weather has been quite ideal for this type of activity for the last couple of days, rain rain rain, so we settled by the Sky Movies channel and relaxed. What can I tell you, it was very much needed after all this time camping around and eating canned food :).

After our recoup, we headed a few kilometers north of Greymouth to a small cozy village of Barrytown. One of the local kiwi families has thought of a great business venture. They run a hands on workshop on how to make a knife starting at the fire and hammer all the way to a nicely sharp and polished product that is yours to keep. The full day of knife making craftsmanship was a tremendous success in our eyes and definitely worth the money (about 60 euro) as the knives are worth more than that since they are hand made and not to speak of the sentimental value. Just check out the prototypes in about half way through the process during the day on the image. I'd rate this experience amongst the best so far on our almost 5 month trip now. Damn, the time flies.

When we were equipped with sharp knives in our backpacks, the next destination were the well known glaciers of Franz Josef and Fox. Funny thing is that the Fox glacier was renamed from the Maori name "Te Moeka o Tuawe" by Sir William Fox who visited it one day and decided to rename it (why can't people just leave stuff as is, the glacier already had a name :)). Anywho, the scenery here is just amazing. There are a tons of guided tour operators that will take you on the actual glacier itself, however, for the prices they were advertising it is really not worth it. You can get for free all the way to the foot of the glacier, so one can definitely get a good view of the massive chunk of ice with a river running below it.