We turn back and head to the Te Waonui Forest Retreat. http://www.tewaonui.co.nz/ The first person to greet us is Melvin the doorman, an official looking Maori warrior.He is initially quite formidable looking but the ladies all think he's quite cute and he is ultra friendly.
The hotel is in the forest and it's posh, including dinner and breakfast. We crash for a bit and then emerge to...find the bar. Anne & I meet a couple of Brits sitting in front of the fireplace.
Shortly we head upstairs to the dining room for our 5-course meal (should have taken a picture of the menu). It's elegant service and one of the waiters is from St. Charles, Missouri! There are Missourians all over the place.
The next morning it's...breakfast buffet time and we tank up as today we are scheduled to do a helicopter ride up onto the glaciers. The weather has been dicey and they are extra careful about not running into a mountain. Yesterday's flight got cancelled in the afternoon as the ceiling lowered around lunch.
We head in town to register and it seems that we are "go" to fly but only to 1 glacier instead of two. We head out across the street to where the helipads have been constructed out of rocks, copters landing, loading and taking off.
The pictures speak for themselves so enjoy. Here are also some links to longer, raw videos that I took:
VIDEO http://youtu.be/SO2z0_0zbRw On the Fox glacier, copter idling. 1 minute
VIDEO http://youtu.be/6UE7SDPmd58 Long video of flight back from the glacier. 10 minutes
 |
| The helipads |
 |
| On Fox glacier |
 |
| Yours truly and bride |
 |
| Bruce, the driver |
 |
| Baby snowman, shortly before Godzilla crushed it |
 |
| Time to go |
 |
| Pilot printing out photos for us |
No comments:
Post a Comment