Day 8

Today was the day of our big Glacier Adventure. We arrived at the glacier guides building and were very happy that our trip wasn't canceled. We got all our waterproof gear since we knew they were expecting rain, and got on the bus to go to the Franz Joseph Glacier. We hiked through thick rainforest up and down steep “trails” on the side of the mountain and in about 1.5 hours, we made it to the face of the glacier. It was pouring rain the whole time. It is so strange to hike through such dense rainforest and then suddenly come upon a huge glacier! The rain and wind were picking up, and the rivers that we had to cross were quickly flooding. There were huge waterfalls all over crashing down the sides of the mountains. So the guides had to cancel the trip up the glacier – bummer. Big bummer. The hike was amazing, but we never got to actually set foot on the glacier. It's good that they did cancel the trip, because we would've never made it back in a few hours time. The river was already very flooded - the guides pretty much had to pull us across the river, and our “trail” back had quickly turned into a waterfall about knee deep. The town is under a “heavy rain warning” - they are expecting 5 to 9 feet of rain (yes, I said feet) in the next 3 days – crazy. So now we're just going to spend the rest of the day in the hot glacier pools and do some laundry. And maybe book our bungy jumping for Tuesday!