Very Cool

Our bus would only take us as far as Franz Joseph so we were forced to spend a night in the tiny west coast town. Little did we know, this town is planted on a valley edge that was/is carved out by a glacier.
Surrounded by a rainforest, we started walking right through the mouth of the glacier towards what looked like a snow capped mountain. A river flowed besides us, silver with a mix of melted ice and rock sediment all washed away by the inevitable melt. As we approached, the air cooled significantly and the snow capped mountain revealed itself as a bluish block of ice, slowly retreating up the side of a mountain.
An Australian couple asked us to take a photo for them. They remembered coming to Franz Joseph glacier some thirty years ago when the spot we were standing on would have been one oversized ice cube. I thought this was very cool.