Franz Josef - it's so cool

A visit to the Westland tourist towns of Franz Josef and Fox Glacier, famed for their towering twin glaciers, mountains, lush rainforest and rugged coastline, can be a revitalising experience, as Wanaka reporter Matthew Haggart found out.

Squeezing myself out of a narrow ice tunnel on Franz Josef Glacier, I couldn't help but feel a little like I'd been reborn.

Getting close to such natural wonders as the frozen ice landscape of Franz Josef glacier can have that effect on you.

We had flown to the upper reaches of the glacier by helicopter - bluebird skies and calm conditions providing our group with stunning views down the crinkled and frozen ice face and out to the Tasman Sea.

Earlier, we had joined a large group of prospective visitors at the headquarters of Franz Josef Glacier Guides queueing for their glacier experience.

Less than an hour later, I was blinking in the bright reflective glare, about 1300m above sea level and surrounded by the spiky glacier landscape above the rainforest-covered slopes of the lower river valley.

After strapping crampons to our boots, our group spent the next couple of hours traversing the glacier, before we arrived at a narrow opening leading straight in to the frozen ice.

Our guide Tai - a diminutive and agile Japanese mountaineer - had the perfect build for squeezing himself into the tight tunnel.

About halfway along the frozen underpass he was leading us through, I was wishing I shared the same attributes.

The first few metres were fine - more than enough room to clamber through, hunched over in a crouched shuffle - but, as we moved further on, the smooth opaque walls became tighter and tighter.

Before too long, I'd dropped on to all fours, before adopting a slithering belly roll to squeeze myself through a particularly tight passage.

Arriving at a point where an icy stream of water gushed through a ruptured fissure in the side of the tunnel, things started to get really interesting.

By the time I found myself jammed in tight, both front, shoulderwise, and also sideways, I was starting to wonder how Pete - the burly miner twice my size from the Australian West Coast - had managed.

It took a fair amount of manoeuvering - the removal of my backpack, the passing through of my camera - before I was able to finally fit through and emerge back on to the glacier surface.

I felt as if I'd just clambered out of some surreal frozen birth canal.

The 12km-long Franz Josef Glacier and neighbouring Fox Glacier (20km to the south) on the western slopes of the Southern Alps form the backbone of the Westland National Park, a designated World Heritage Site.

The area is a magnet for tourists and backpackers, who visit the area as part of a "must do" West Coast road trip.