Westland Tai Poutini National Park: Hike around Lake Matheson

In the morning it was fine with the weather, but in general we really can't complain. So far we've only had one rainy night, but rain is forecast for the afternoon...so we used the rain-free time for a short, easy hike around Lake Matheson. It was nice, about 1.5 hours and at the end we were rewarded with a cappuccino large (wife and child) and a flat white regular (coffee sommelier Pitti).

Before that we were able to look at the Fox Glacier from a distance. The unusual thing about the two glaciers Fox and Franz Josef is that both have their glacier tongues at around 400 m above sea level. This makes the two among the deepest glaciers in the world. Another curiosity: the two glaciers were actually named by Leonard Harper in 1852 after the then English royal couple Victoria and Albert, he just forgot to make this known. Ergo, in 1865 the German explorer Julius von Haas named one glacier after the then Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, the other glacier received its name in 1872 after a visit by the New Zealand Prime Minister William Fox, who was in office at the time. In Maori, the Franz Josef Glacier is called "Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere - The Tears of Hine Hukatere", the Fox Glacier is called "Te Moeke o Tuawe - The Deathbed of Tuawe". According to legend, Tuawe died while hiking in the mountains and his companion Hine Hukatere cried so bitterly that a glacier formed from her tears.

Both glaciers are tourism hotspots in New Zealand, but it is precisely this tourism that will probably be their end. In the 1990s it was still possible to reach the mouth of the glacier on foot, but now tourists have to be brought up by helicopter, an ecological madness. In the next few years the glaciers will have retreated by another 5 km, meaning that Franz Josef, for example, will have lost around 40 percent of its original size!

Windshield wiper instead of indicator counter: 94

Addendum: I spoke to patrons on the phone and was reminded to continue to thank them. Therefore: THANK YOU FRIZZ the magazine !

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