My birthday

Not only is tomorrow my 24th birthday, it's also the last day of having our campervan as the New Zealand part of the trip looms to a close. I'll miss the campervan alot, we've had it for exactly 50 days and have grown rather used to it, but I admit I'm looking forward to not having to make my bed every night, or putting it away every morning. I don't think I'll miss New Zealand either, at least not in the way I miss Australia. Don't get me wrong, this is an amazing country and I can't say a single bad thing about it, but I felt alot more at home in Australia, Sydney in particular. I also miss my family and friends, but I've decided to kill two birds with one stone and pop back to Sydney for a few days. In case you didn't know, my sister has recently moved there to study for a year. So it's the perfect opportunity to see her again, as it'll be the last chance I'll get for another ten months or so.

I don't have alot else to report, it seems like more interesting things are happening back home. Gordon Brown is pissing alot of people off which was to be expected I guess, but I expect the tabloids are even blaming him for all the flooding in Oxfordshire that has been happening. If you look very closely, especially at the editorials, I guarantee one paper has actually blamed him, at least indirectly.

I have of course been getting all my news mainly from the BBC website and although I've always trusted the BBC it's sad to see them ballsing up like they did with the phone votes thing. Hardly the right message to send to a new government when you're trying to secure more licence money. The only other source of media from back home I can get regularly is the 'International Express' newspaper, not a collaborative effort involving news agencies around the world in a hope of making international events have a higher appeal to unite the human race, Oh no! It's sadly just the edited highlights of that week's London Daily Express, which barely even qualifies as a newspaper. It's a bit disturbing to have foreign countries believe ours is a one in which the jailing of four would-be suicide bombers is less interesting than the Spice Girls reuniting. I especially loved the part where they said that although they all get on famously with each other they'll each have their own private jet to take them from gig to gig. Nice to know they haven't changed, eh?

But I suppose the one thing I don't miss from home is the tabloids shoving all that crap down my throat. It annoys me like hell, but the strange thing is I know when I touch down back home, I'll pick up a copy of the Sun at the airport.

Glacier mince

There can't be too many places in the world where you can trek through temperate rainforest for an hour and a half and end up halfway up one of the only advancing glaciers in the world, but the West Coast of New Zealand's South Island is one of them.

The Fox and Franz Josef glaciers are majestic rivers of frozen snow, flowing slowly but (at the moment) steadily from the slopes of the Southern Alps stopping roughly 250 meters above sea level. The Fox Glacier township is where we found ourselves last weekend and we booked ourselves a half day hike on the glacier itself. After climbing the steep valley walls for an hour or so we came to the access point for the glacier itself, and spent about an hour walking across this most unique of environments. Unfortunately we weren't blessed with brilliant weather but the scale and majesty of the glacier wasn't lost on us. From its neve to its terminal face the Fox Glacier is about seven kilometers long, and it is advancing after years of retreat. You wouldn't expect a drought in a country two thousand miles away to cause a glacier to advance, but as the warm air from Australia crosses the Tasman Sea it evaporates sea water, storing it as rain until it hits New Zealand's southern alps. The vapour falls as snow which is essentially fuel for the glaciers and the warmer Australia gets the more the glaciers will advance.

As we climbed down and looked at the glacier before departing, our guide advised us to take a good look as the chances are it will never look this way again. It's such a fascinating landscape, hopefully one day I'll get to see just how much it changes every year.

The next day I celebrated the glorious weather we awoke to by getting into a tiny plane, climbing to 12,000 feet and jumping out with a large man called James strapped to my back. I had entered the exhilirating and rather bizarre world of tandem skydiving. It's very difficult to describe because there is really no feeling like it (certainly none that I've ever had) but seeing Mts Cook and Tasman (NZ's highest peaks), the glaciers and a few rivers and lakes from that high up was incredible. It's alot more gentle and far less scary than I'd expected - mainly because the views are so breathtaking there's no time to be scared. I'd recommend it to anyone.