Message Stick

We reluctantly tore ourselves away from Nelson lakes to travel onto the west coast, home of the pancake rocks! The  rocks are eroded by the elements leaving them looking kind of like a stack of pancakes, or so the locals say. Though impressive we got more excited seeing our first live possum (we’ve countless dead on the road). They’re considered vermin here so we got some odd looks from an Aussie family when we knelt down to take a photo.

If you look closely at the first photograph below you might just make out some seals hiding at the bottom. There was quite a large colony near to ‘possum’ rocks and it was cool to watch them in the wild, no ball balancing tricks here.

With a long drive ahead of us to Queenstown we paid a visit to Franz Josef and Fox glaciers on the way. We didn’t see any polar bears at Fox glacier so presume they don’t make the mints here. We did see two enormous glaciers however that are still advancing in size, pretty rare these days. To appreciate their vastness fully companies offered helicopter rides along the glaciers. Our budget however only stretched to the free walking tour, ending around 100 metres from the face. Not that we’d want to venture too nearer, two Aussies were killed by falling ice last month trying to take close-up pictures!