We were up early as we had planned to do a glacier walk but after exploring the area we decided not to and to do our own walk instead..for free! We parked up and got our stuff together and set off. We stopped at a lookout called sentinal rock along the walk which gave us our first view of the glacier. From there we trekked/tramped down to the glacier face. It was a lovely walk across what was once the river bed, and along the current river. We kept spotting waterfalls along the way, lots of narrow thin ones. The glacier was very impressive but not as smooth as we had expected it to be, perhaps because of people walking across it. We had lunch at the base before going to mooch at a waterfall and river.
From there we made our way back to Newt and made our way down to Fox glacier. We went to Lake Matheson and walked around it taking in the views of Mount Cook and Mount Tasman. We stopped at the reflecting pool where in the morning you can get a good picture of the mountains reflected in the lake. We tried to get the same image but with no luck! We then went on to see the glacier itself. This time we didn't walk right up to it, just observed from a distance! We drove a little further and spent the night in Haast. We were expecting it to be a bigger town and were a little disappointed with the size! The site was swamped with sandflies and they liked to nibble on us!