Postcard from New Zealand

DH and I are in New Zealand right now - so exciting! That's right, no challenges except scheduled ones, but this week at Less Is More the colour is Aqua, and I'm going to have to pass on it as far as cards are concerned. But I can't help showing you what we did today instead, which is aqua. VERY aqua indeed. In fact, the very colour which the word "aqua" comes from: water in its rawest form.

We drove up to the Tasman glacier, which is the longest glacier in NZ at 27km, the oldest at over 18,000 years, and the fastest-melting at 300m per year. We went on a boat trip with Glacier Explorers, and they took us around Lake Tasman to within 600m of the glacier face. Fortunately for us, there had been a "basal calving" just a week ago so there were plenty of ice-bergs on the lake. Even more luckily, a couple of them had turned overnight, exposing the clean, ancient underside of 300-year-old, pressurised, crystal-clear, pure blue ice. I have never seen anything like it.

Here it is, with an older ice-berg beside it for colour comparison.

And with Mount Cook, or Aoraki, in the background:

A close-up of the ice:

A close-up (as close as my camera could get from 600m away) of the edge of Tasman glacier. The top is all covered with gravel for a few km, and that protects it from melting in the sun. See the blue where the ice has broken away recently?

Tomorrow we're going up a mountain in a gondola (ski-lift) and I'm paragliding down. DH hasn't decided what he's doing yet. I think he's checking his life insurance first. :-)