Heli-hike on Fox Glacier and circumnavigate Lake Matheson.

We wake, dress, get caffeinated and are at the Fox Glacier Heli-hiking office a two-minute walk from our split-level rooms. We ask the Asian gal behind the counter if our 8:50 ride is going to take off. She tells us to hang stage left; the weather reports vary in 10-minute increments and the pilots are waiting for the next “gen” to come in. Yesterday’s flights were canceled, she confirms.

We hang. After five minutes, a different, loud-voiced gal announces the hike is going to leave shortly — cheers from the crowd … no kidding … these flights are that iffy — and we should hang some more.

We hang with about 20 others in the gift shop area and after a while a young guy in “guide gear” named Philip appears and beckons us into a room with benches facing another room that has floor-to-ceiling racks with very sturdy and well used hiking boots hanging everywhere. He tells us to ditch our shoes and socks, get a pair of each from the other guide, Julia, behind the counter — Julia, though David does not notice, is a young svelte and blonde Nordic goddess — and adds he will give further instructions as we progress.

Cynthia leaves to return to our room to get her wet gear and additional layers in case the glacier’s seriously cold. David concentrates on not staring at Julia. While Cynthia’s away, Philip, the guide, starts briefing us about what will happen next: put on waterproof pants and jackets provided by Fox, grab wool gloves, DON’T go to the bathroom or ask any questions until you’ve rugged up and gone outside to board a bus for a 2-minute ride to a hut by a helipad.

Cynthia returns (with all the clothing she now does not need because Fox Glacier Guiding supplies them) just in time to rug up and get on the bus. When we get to the hut by the helipad, our large group is subdivided into four smaller groups — parties of 4, 5, 6 and 6 — and each subgroup must stand together on a metal pad to be weighed for the short flights. The two lightest, smallest in each group get smiley faces magic-markered to the backs of their wrists, and are weighed together — they will sit in the front seats next to the pilots — and we wait in an outdoor corral next to the 3-chopper helipad so our four groups will load the choppers in turn. We are in group 4 with two newlyweds from California and an elderly German couple.

Final advice before boarding, “You don’t need to crouch when you board but don’t go near the back. Oh, yes, please don’t wave to your friends as you step up and in.”

Cynthia and the female newlywed got “faced,” so they get in first when it’s our group’s turn to board the incredibly small helicopter with the glass windows all around that David is convinced has a suboptimal chance of remaining airborne. The young pilot lifts us off the ground so gently that David’s not even sure we’re up but the pilot almost immediately takes a sharp slingshot turn that puts the chopper on its side as it swoops in a loop to head up the steep walled valley toward the glacier, gleaming in the distance between rocky crags.

We swoop and dive simultaneously onto a flat patch sparsely marked by black stones on the glacier, and descend some steps cut in the ice to an area about 15 by 15 feet with low, gray plastic lockers on one side. Julia opens a locker, pulls out a pair of cramp-ones and instructs us how to attach them to our boots. Then, we’re off.

The glacier IS amazing; we’re about 750-780 meters above sea level and the main path of the glacier rises about another 1,000 meters to its neves above us. It changes colors depending on how the sunlight glancing intermittently through drifting gray and white clouds strikes it. A large waterfall gushes off a steep slope to our left. It’s roughly our destination for a three-hour hike. Julia leads, very carefully, cutting steps into the glacier with an axe worthy of Paul Bunyan, and stops often to tell us, “Don’t go the left of that ridge, the ice is unstable and we’re not sure what’s under it. The ice here is about 120 meters thick so if the ice breaks over a crevasse, it’s good-bye.”

From the two neves above, two separate glaciers join and cascade down a single wide defile between two massive peaks, brown with rock at the edges and whiter and bluer in the middle. The crags of ice and crevasses surround us; we often dip so low in a defile that we cannot see anything around us except walls of ice. Julia says that New Zealand has more than 3,000 glaciers, the most of any single country.

We stop at various points to climb into tunnels under arches of thick ice. The tunnels glow that eerie glacial, mineral blue, which Julia tells us is because the surface of the tunnel — of much of the ice on a glacier — is more compact than the rougher ice on the surface so it absorbs the red and yellow wavelengths, but not the blue, which it reflects. At other times, we stare at the pools of glacial blue water. Julia tells us she and some friends swam in one the other day. David has no trouble imagining that: Nordic nymphs cavorting naked in glacial pools. We crawl through some tunnels that are so narrow and twisting that some of our group decline the experience.

After the hike ends and we are choppered back to town, we do laundry and administrative chores and then drive six kliks to walk around Lake Matheson, a lake that can turn into a mirror reflecting Mt. Tasman, Mt. Cook and other peaks. But not for us today. A light wind riffles the water and we’re content to stroll around the lake on paths with beautiful thick mosses of several varieties and textures. Like being in Japan almost. Rare, tiny red and blue mushrooms grow here and there and we end the walk by having a very nice dinner at the Matheson Lake café, whose windows overlook a pasture where about 50 brown-and-white patched cows ruminate and pose for pictures taken with abandon by several small groups of Chinese.

Another lucky, very different day in Paradise.