Glacier Day. We started off going to Franz Josef Glacier. Very impressive, even beautiful (although once again the constant drone of helicopters was a detractor). Also very interesting, how the glaciers form and progress.
From there, on to Fox Glacier, also very interesting and beautiful. We did a third hike today, up to a “glow-worm” tunnel. This was a tunnel carved through from one valley to another to divert water for use in gold extraction. Not too successful, because they failed to find any gold to mine! The tunnel is narrow, very wet, and once you’re in the middle and turn off your torch, it is possible to see the glow-worms on the roof. The glow-worms were much less interesting than the history of the tunnel.
Mark and John: the guided walk up to the Franz Josef glacier is not too hard, so long as you take is steadily and slowly. Actually it might perhaps be best to avoid a guided walk, so that you could set your own pace. The walk to Fox Glacier I would not recommend on grounds of how steep it is, and how rough the track is. Dinner we had at The Matheson, at Matheson lake. Good food, not expensive, great location, and Mischievous Kea available.
Day 10
We started with a lovely walk around Lake Matheson. It is billed as a mirror lake for its reflections but there was too much wind and consequent ripples for the mirror effect to be seen. 
Nevertheless beautiful, with lovely scenery and birdlife – Tuis and others (see picture).
We then had a long drive down to Haast, then over to Waneka and back to Queenstown. Interesting drive down the coast: a good road but very steep and winding as it goes over the promontories arising from the very steep mountains. There is no in-between land here: its either steep-sided mountains or very flat floodplains down to the sea. The rivers are opaque grey water, with all the “rock flour”. As this precipitates, the broad floodplains are formed. An interesting consequence of this is that the road bridges are all semi-permanent single-lane bridges, because they are easily raised to accommodate the rise in river-bed level 20-30cm per year!
We stopped at “Puzzling World” in Waneka. Very amusing and well worth a visit. All sorts of optical illusions and tricks. Also †he best maze I have been in. It took Nick and I about 35 min. to complete the challenge of reaching all four corners and then finding our way to the exit. Average is apparently 60-90 min. “Is it an unfair advantage that there are two of us” Nick asked. Yes, if the two are Nick and David Coulshed. Now there is a challenge for you.
Back to Queenstown. Fill up the hire car with petrol. Buy the Altitude “Mischievous Kea” and Renaissance “Stonecutter” beers to take back with us. We fly back to Sydney tomorrow morning.
Overall
New Zealand at this time of year is lovely (Mark and John take note, this could be he best time to plan for). It is amazingly similar to England in the summertime – the temperatures are similar, the long days are great, it’s not too hot. There are a lot of other similarities. The countryside looks very similar, with deep green foliage on the trees, green grass (as compared to the brown/yellow grass of Australia). The birdlife is similar even without the feral imports (we have seen blackbirds and chaffinches). There is a similar smell in the woodlands from the damp leaf mould, I think.