Day 18 - Rest Day
We are now halfway through the filming and have a 4 day break. I am split as to what to do. Some of us are going off skiing in the mountains, others going off down to the south of the Island to the fiord land. What should I do? Well I set my heart on learning about jade carving last time I was in New Zealand so I really wanted to go off to the jade carving centres and get some jade to take home. So I head off to Hokitika (called Hoki by the locals) about 100 miles to the north of Franz Josef.

Now writing this after eating in Café de Paris in Hoki. I am in a good mood and taking in everything. Staying in a delightful B&B opposite the Museum in this compact little town (Teichelmann’s B&B). It is the old doctor's house and run by two very friendly and kind people. Much better than the various motels in town.

Left Franz Josef about 9:30 in the morning. I had called in on the two Mikes to see if they wanted to get some breakfast but they had had a late night before and so I went on my own. While I was sitting in the coach waiting to leave they came past and banged on the window. The coach was packed and it was quite nice to have some people to say bye to me. The Mikes pawed at the window jokingly pleading with me to stay and Mike B wishing me a good trip. They go off to the café to get some breakfast and while I am sitting there surrounded by other travellers Mike L does a mooney from the café window!! There are no words.. No words ..

Went round the jade centres in Hoki. I was hoping that I might get to go up a river and find my own but the rock is actually very difficult to spot and one can only really tell it by cutting the boulders open. After talking to a few of the jade carvers in the workshops in Hokitika I learnt a lot about this amazing rock. Took some good photos and managed to get some rough-cut sawn jade samples that I can work on when I get home.

Brought some bone and jade carving books in Hokitika and also a little treasure ‘Live to Paint & Paint to Live’ by a New Zealand artist Rita Angus. Very inspiring book and just perfect for reading in the evenings.
Went onto the beach today. All the houses tend to look toward the Alps' range that runs to the other side of the town to the beach. It's as though the people have forgotten about the beach!

The beach is very simple and an almost forgotten part of town. The sea roars - that immense surf wall - not loud but immense all the same.

Day 19 - Rest Day
Slept well from about 9 pm to 7 am last night. Read William Blake till I fell asleep warm and tired. Got going about 9 am and took the road walking deciding to get to a nearby lake, Lake Kinari, about 15-20 km away. So I packed my bag and headed off on the road gloriously carefree, just walking … I love walking with everything I need on my back and a map ...

Lake Kinari is about 15 km or so from Hoki and it took me till about noon to get to the lakeside. This is a breathtaking spectacular place with vast mountains behind a mirror surface. On the way up I had planned to sit and have lunch here and take a couple of hours to do detailed drawings. I wanted to stay still for a couple of hours so that my feet could get a good rest. I did manage to eat my lunch but as it happened the sand flies found me and as I was obviously the only living thing around for miles they decided to eat me for lunch! So my 2-hour break and my patience ran out after a quarter of an hour and I was once again on the move.

On the map that I had followed to the lake there was marked a scenic walk where one could follow an old water sluice that was used in the Gold Rush days to bring water to the machines working in the gold fields in that area. In fact the next day the B&B owner was very kind and took me around these gold fields showing me the photos from the 1800s and how nature had reclaimed the area. At one time large wooded towns would be on the move through this part of NZ - following the gold.

Anyway the water duct meanders its way through miles of the country and you can follow it through the hills and woodland - it’s a great walk. So instead of following the road back to Hoki I took this track through the wood along the side of the historic waterway. This was a great little adventure but it took me far off the path and added many miles to my walk.

Eventually the path led me back again onto the road to Hoki but a little further down the road. It was still another 10 km or so to Koki so I tried my hand at hitching a lift. After about an hour and a few cars passing me by a woman stopped and offered me a lift. She said that she didn’t often give lifts to people but she had seen me going up the road in the morning and had wondered what I was doing. Although the New Zealanders are a friendly bunch it is not easy to hitch on the west coast so I was lucky - my feet were very grateful!

Back in Hoki after a 20 km or so hike I sit outside a café drinking a coffee in the winter sunshine. My feet will forgive me and I feel fit and well. It also seems that everyone on the west coast eventually comes through Hokitika at some time!

Day 22 - Speed and Melt of Glacier
The Ice Road
Fresh snow falls and falls upon high,
On an ice mountain nestled in the sky.
Funnelled in between these high peaks,
On a slow journey downward it seeks.
Compacting, slipping in its mountain vice,
Five miles of hard sculptured ice.
Its vast slow weight compressing it hard,
Below ancient rock is cut and scarred.
A vast blue eternal ice train,
Shunting forward to the glacier moraine.

The day starts with Kathy explaining to camera the maths of how you might determine the rate at which the glacier is moving. We will use something called a plane table survey to estimate the speed of the glacier. We need to measure angles from two fixed points to a third point of the glacier - the two fixed points being a known distance (baseline) apart.

I start on a protractor good enough to measure the small angles that we expect for the relatively small movement we will measure (given that we only have one day). I decide to make up a protractor having a circumference (180 degrees) of 180 cm so that each cm is 1 degree. 1/10 of a degree is simply a mm on this scale and easily read off. Made up two of these and painted the dials and made an angle arm so that angles can be measured easily.

The idea is that a flag will be fixed in place at a prominent place on the glacier ice. This will be visible at each of the sites of the two protractors which will be set up on land. These protectors are 50 m apart and visible from each other. By measuring the angles we can work out how far the flag is away. If we do the same measurements the next day we will have two positions for the flag corresponding to the movement of the flag from one measurement to the next. From this we can determine the amount of movement over one day and therefore the speed of the moving glacier.

Kathy, Mike and I make up the protractors, tripods and flags for the measurement. We do a dry run on land and this works out very well. So we know the equipment and ideas are working OK, this is a great way to end day 1 - very happy.

Day 23 - Speed and Melt of Glacier
Spend the first 1-2 hours of today getting all the bits and pieces ready for the helicopter ride to the glacier. The flight was totally amazing very very exciting.

We were put down on the middle of the glacier and our guide Chris was to take us over the ice to the side of the glacier where we could put our gear and make the measurements. It was really wonderful to be on the ice and in the heart of the glacier. We had a great lunch on the ice just before the descent to the ground where we would make our measurements. A real feast on the ice - Chris had done his guiding and food work well.

Kathy, Mike and I set up the equipment and then Kathy and I toss a coin to see who would go up to the ice again and plant the flag. She won the toss and headed off with Chris. Meanwhile Kate, Mike L and I set up the protractors and the baseline so that they were aligned and ready for the readings.

It was quite a long hike for Kathy and it took about 20 mins before they appeared in the distance near to the top of one of the mountains of ice. They drilled a hole for the flag and planted it on top. Meanwhile Kate, Mike L and I made the first day measurements on the flag with the equipment set up. It went very well. I aligned the pointer arm to the flag on both protractors and Mike L read out the angles. Then we drew a scale map using the protractors. This gave us our first estimate for the distance of the flag which came out as 150m distant - a great result!!

Later on Kate told me that she had asked one of the helicopter pilots to fly over the flag to film it but he had told her that they would never be able to find it, as the glacier is so immense. Anyway she told him that the flag was 150m from the right hand side of the valley walls using our trigonometrical result. Apparently the pilot found it easily testifying to the success of the measurements!

Once this was done for the camera I was assuming that we were going to be able to do the measurements very carefully so that I could get reliable figures but NO! We didn’t have any time left before the helicopter was arriving to pick us up for the night! So we spend a good deal of the day crossing ice and being filmed only to have a few seconds to actually make the real measurements - that’s Rough Science for you!!

The copters arrive and we are whisked off near to the top of the mountain where we are to stay for the night in a mountain (Alma) hut.

Alma Hut is at about 2000m asl in the permanent snow. It has wonderful views to the sea and of course the glacier below and the often falling ice from the mountainous peaks all around. In the hut were Kathy, Mike L, Chris, myself, John (soundman) and Derek (cameraman) and also Martin (director). We had a great time. There were two rooms in the hut; Kathy, Derek and I had the extension room (for the non snorers!) while the rest slept in the main room. When the lights were out it was pitch dark and not a sound apart from the snoring!

Before we retired we went outside. Moonless night but the stars of the Milky Way were so bright you could see by them. It was bitter cold. Kathy and Mike L wanted to make up some ice lenses so they both tried different techniques. Mike put some water into bowls and left them on the snow to freeze while Kathy filled a balloon (to make up the lens shape) and left it to hang in the air.

Day 24 - Speed and Melt of Glacier
Last night I was a little paranoid that I might snore especially as I was in the non-snoring room! Apparently though I didn’t which is a relief. However, I was in one of the top bunks which unknown to me were the ones with a thick plastic base, so apparently I crinkled all night!! Also one other point that won't come over in the TV programmes is that although the sleeping bags were very good mine smelt of feet (not mine) terribly!

In the morning we ventured out into the cold to see the view. It was a slightly overcast morning which was a little disappointing but it was still invigorating. Mike's water had frozen into lenses but they had cracked quite a lot. Kathy’s water-filled balloons had not even frozen - just shows you how good air is as an insulator!!

We had time to spare before the helicopter took us back to the equipment for the second day of measurements. So we had a bit of fun filming a spoof about the hut. Kathy introduced the ‘Hut’ to the camera, took it on a guided tour. Meanwhile I was in bed reading a book and when she came over I read a passage out which was very appropriate! Then she went out to see Mike L who was in the dunny! … Now the mountain hut had its own loo away from the Hut. It must be a loo with one of the best views in the world. As Kathy opened the door there was Mike L reading the newspaper!!

We took the helicopters back to luncheon rock and to the equipment. Found that the protective plastic sheets for the equipment were missing and I thought at first that it was due to the wind from the helicopters. After finding the bags I noticed that they were all pecked to bits. In fact it wasn’t the wind that had removed the covers, it was a little bird! They are called cheeky Keas in the area and they are famous/infamous for pecking, stealing and generally causing havoc on the west coast of New Zealand! All the protractors were misaligned and one even had its plastic mm gauge bitten off!

So we set up the protractors as best we could and then started to make the measurements on the new position of the glacier flag. This all worked out well for the right hand protractor B, but protractor A could have been way off. Kathy used the angle measurements to put into the maths (trig) and this overcomes any drawing errors that you might get sketching the scale drawing. Anyway it all worked out OK and we got an estimate of about a movement of about 1m for a day's glacier advance.