We finally arrived in Franz Joseph at around 4pm. We checked into what we thought was a motel but it was in fact a back packers lodge, so very cheap and cheerful but at least we had our own cooking facilities and bathroom etc. and it was cheap!! We didn’t take many photos here at all because we liter
ally checked into the motel then went for something to eat and then headed back to the motel as we were shattered.
Here is a photo of the glacier which I took on our way back to the motel. 
This is somewhere that we definitely want to revisit as you can do either a half day or a whole day trek on and inside the glacier. The photos in the leaflet look amazing, so we’ve put that on our to do list.
The town was quite noisy with the sound of helicopters taking to the skies every 10 mins.
We hardly got any sleep in this place, it was quite noisy being a backpackers lodge and right next to the side of the bed on my side was the fridge which kept making loud noises all through night. Think we’ll book somewhere else on our next visit!!
As we were awake fairly early we decided to get going by 8:00am and headed back to Greymouth with a short stop at Okarito to take some photos.
Greg’s parents took us to Okarito on our first trip to New Zealand. It’s a lovely little place, not much there, no shops, but lovely scenery and nice and quiet. Here are a few photos that Greg took when we stopped off there.
After taking photos, we got back on the road and after a while we decided to stop at a place called Pukekura for a loo break!
We had been to this place before but it was around Christmas time and they had a beautiful stag in the enclosure behind the restaurant.
We didn’t find the stag this time, but we found some other cute animals……….
This is in fact a wallaby, not quite sure where they got it from. Perhaps it skipped over from Australia when they weren’t looking!!!
Well guys, that just about concludes our whistle stop tour of some of the South Island. From here we drove on to Greymouth and arrived back around 2pm on the Thursday afternoon. We hope you enjoyed our little journey and some of the photos we took along the way.
WATCH OUT FOR KIWI’S CROSSING THE ROAD!!!!!!