When I looked through the window in the morning I was met by the biggest blackest cloud ever! We hoped by the time we'd sorted ourselves out and got to Franz Josef it may of blown over but no such luck. If anything it was worse! We were running late thanks to a Chinese family taking forever to get out of the dump station, and by the time we checked in, the rest of our group had all their equipment and were ready to go. We got given boots, socks, fleeces, hats, gloves, crampon's and a waterproof coat, so we were well prepared for anything. That is until we got to the Helli pad, and the pilots refused to fly us up because all the clouds had rolled in on the mountain. We hung around for 10 minutes feeling very annoyed with the situation, but miraculously and all of a sudden, the clouds disappeared and we were off. Five minutes later and we were on the ice 2000ft above sea level. They were worried about the weather coming back in and leaving us stuck up there, but it did the opposite of the for cast and cleared up into a beautiful day. It was weird to think we were stood on a frozen river of ice more than 80m thick. As soon as we all had our crampon's on we set off up the ice, our guide cutting us steps with his pick as we went. He also had to keep his eye out for any potential ice blocks that were likely to fall on us and knock them off before they did. We were on the ice for a good 3hrs, our guide leading us up, over, under and through all sorts of ice formations and caves. The ice is that dense the sunlight can't penetrate it properly and it appears a deep blue in colour. We got some spectacular views and he even showed us a crevasse, which would of ran as deep as the glacier itself. Crampon's off again, and we were back in the helicopter and back in base camp before we knew it. After a lunch of Mel's yummy stew from the night before, we went for a dip in some glacier fed hot pools. We had been given free access to them with our glacier trip and we took full advantage. We even paid an extra $5 each so we could come back again after dark when they had fancy lights lighting up the water. By the time we'd finished in the pools and found our DOC site it was gone half eight, so we russled up a quick tea and hit the hay. The rain we were meant to of had that day all came that night and kept waking us up.