Here's another wild thing you can do when you travel to wild places. Glacier hiking!  In weird and wonderful New Zealand, glaciers crawl through rainforest.  The only other place you can do this is in Chile.  You put on shorts, slap on some suntan lotion, and set out across the moraine.

You may not know it, but most glaciers are riddled with wormholes and tunnels through which the melting ice drains. That's the situation at the Franz Josef Glacier on the middle west coast of the South Island.  It advances at a rate of several meters per day, making it one of the world's fastest.  I've been outfitted with metal-studded boots and an ice axe.  And we climbed for six hours over more than a mile uphill on the glacier.  I came back with a tan.

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