In the morning someone in the backpackers saw my hat with the text "Finland" in it, and said "huomenta" (good morning in Finnish) to me. He just walked by, and didn't explain anything. When we checked in, I noticed someone from Sweden staying in the lodge that night. Maybe I met just this guy.

We packed our things, and took them under the receptionist's eye. Then we headed by foot to the "Alpine Guides". We had some time, so we sat outside, and had a few thoughts about the Fox Glacier as a town. There are only some dozens of houses, half of them are some kind of accommodation, three of them are restaurants, and one is the Visitor Information Centre. There are also one airfield, and at least three helicopter landing areas.

We went to the glacier terminus by a 30 year old Bedford bus driven by our guide, Colin, who looked like actor Steve Martin. Then we started hiking with those three-kilos-a-piece iron spiked boots in a narrow mountain path towards the glacier. The whole tour took three hours. It took one hour to get to the place, where we entered the ice, and another back. So we were around one hour on the ice. The guides carve steps every morning for this kind of tours, since the flowing water, and the moving ice causes the old steps sometimes to disappear very quickly. Also Colin hacked the steps deeper with a pickaxe just in front of us to make our tour safe. The whiteness of the ice almost hurt my eyes. On the ice I couldnt avoid thinking that the whole Finland has in the ice age been covered with similar, even thicker coating of ice. The Finnish land forms are made by the melting and moving ice during a very long period. Here you could sense similar, but smaller formations being created daily under the ice.

After returning from the ice, we were really hungry, so we had pizza for lunch. After that we started our next leg towards Wanaka. In Haast we had some quick meal, filled up the bike, and headed inlands via Haast Pass.

In NZ, there are lots of place names, roads or paths, that consist of a person name and "Pass". They are mostly routes over some mountains with the finders name attached. So if you want your route to be spectacular, collect as many passes as you can to your planned route. Similar code words are Gorge and Saddle.

There were many waterfalls along the Hast Pass route. Because of our riding gear, we weren't so keen on walking twenty minutes to a waterfall, so luckily we found one only two minutes from the road. We had some picnic type snack at the waterfall. We were alone during our stop. Probably no-one else found the same waterfall.

Haast Pass was full of one lane bridges. In this phase of our trip, I had got used to the mountain roads, as well as to the bouncing battleship we were riding. So our typical speed was well over 100 kph most of the time. Since there were no traffic, I normally just released the throttle before the bridges, and since there was nobody, I just shooted across the bridges. However, releasing the throttle before such bridge causes your speed to drop maybe somewhere around 80 kph. Couple of times I sweared the inefiiciency of the bike brakes, since I found it hard to stop, when I had to yield before a bridge. Then I realized how one can become numb to the speed. It wasn't the ineffectiveness of the brakes. Some 50 meters just isn't enough for reacting, and stopping a bike from 90 kph in a downhill curve...

In the evening we arrived to Wanaka YHA. The place was very nice, and Nic in the reception was very kind and helpful. Here we had our first crisis about what we should do next. Should we ride two long days and see the Milford Sound, or should we head back north getting maybe one day on a beach also. When Nic tried to get some accommodation for us, we realized, that if we wanted to go to Mt Cook YHA, we couldn't have any room for next night, but the night after. So we had one extra day to spend, so we decided to go to the Milford Sound. So the destiny (or the YHA bookings) decided, that I would see the famous Homer Tunnel, and our next two days would be 520 and 460 kilometers long. We managed to get an accommodation to Lake Manapouri, that is 140 km from Milford Sound, close to Te Anau. During our trip, we never knew more than three days in advance, where we were going, or where we would stay overnight. Of course except our start and end in Auckland, and invitation to Lynnes' and Broome's homes.