Franz Josef and Glacier Hiking...

Hi Everyone,
I hope everyone is good!
We're in Franz Josef! We arrived yesterday late afternoon and settled into our very nice hostel 'Chateau Franz'. We headed over to the Blue Ice Bar around the corner for our dinner! Ow before that we had a bit of a problem, basically I was recording a video message to sent to Imogen for her 21st! Happy Birthday!!! lol! I ran out of memory space so I headed to the hostel computers to use the internet, but my external hard drive WITH ALL OUR PHOTOS FROM THE WHOLE TRIP started beeping (which it has never done before) and generally acting really weird. Anyways we headed down to the red bus internet cafe, LITERALLY A RED BUS its sooooo cool! And I plugged it in here, it worked ok, but we copied all the photos onto a re-writable dvd just in case! Don't want to have to worry about it, its good that they're all backed up now!
Anyways, Franz Josef seems really lovely! We're very impressed, it's a lot better than Greymouth! We do think we got the best out of Greymouth but it was very grey and not very interesting!
Today I had a lay in, Rob went and checked his e-mails, then we we headed to the Post Office to send LOADS of my stuff home!!! Which has made my bag A LOT LIGHTER!!! Yey! But was really expensive, so I'm not very happy about that part!
Anyways, after that we head to Franz Josef Glacier Guides where we were booked in to do a half day hike! We were given boots raincoats and crampons (to hold not wear yet), which were all very fetching! lol! We then got in a bus that took us 10mins down the road to the glacier river car park.
We walked for about 3km over rocks, up and down ladders etc before arriving at the bottom of the glacier where our helpful guide Bruce instructed us on how to walk on the glacier, basically legs shoulder length apart, always walk down facing forward etc. We put our crampons on the bottom of our boots and started walking up! As we went Bruce had a massive axe and he carved the steps out for us!
IT WAS ABSOLUTELY AWESOME!!! Daddy you would really really have loved it! It was easier than our great wall hike, about the same distance though! Although I still think I'm going to be sore tomorrow morning! lol! We walked up past the black ice, which is basically just rumble from the hills surrounding the glacier, onto the white and blue ice! Its soooo weird that the ice is actually blue! We walked through cave things and everything! It was absolutely AMAZING! I loved it soooooo much, it was sooooo fun! You really need the crampons through because you would just fall over sooooo easily if you didn't!
At really steep bits they had ropes that they screwed into the ice so that we could hold on, cause some of the steeps were really high up!
All in all it was FANTASTIC! So cool to be hiking over a glacier, I'm knackered now through!
We're gonna go and make dinner now! We head to Nelson tomorrow which everyone we have talked to has said is really nice! Only 3 nights left on the South Island!!!
Any news from the UK?
Lots of Love,
Sarah xxx