Day 16: Stars and Steam

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The stargazing was everything I could have hoped for. They lent us free winter coats, and they had one big enough for me. In fact, mine wasn't even the largest size. It fit *over* my winter-weight windbreaker. I was very, very layered; ordinary underwear, silk underwear, clothes, jacket, winter-weight windbreaker, and winter coat. But I needed every bit of it in the northerly wind on that mountain. I was comfortably warm, but never hot, except on the bus travelling up the mountain to the observatory.

My $80 bought two full hours of stargazing time, plus half an hour each way of transportation. I got back to Tailor-Made Tekapo well after 1 a.m., completely disrupting my sleep schedule. (I'd been getting to bed by 7:30 or 8 and to sleep by 8:30 or 9.) They were kind enough to drop us off at our motels so we wouldn't have to walk back in the dark.

It was a wonderful experience. We had a crystal-clear night and the roof of the observatory largely blocked out the quarter moon from the southern sky.
I spent most of my two hours staring southward, though I did wander over to the northern side to see Jupiter and the Pleiades through a telescope.

I knew more about the northern sky than most of the tour group, but I had to ask for help in finding the Argo. Once it had been pointed out to me I could see it. I also saw Alpha and Beta Centauri (but had trouble tracing the Centaur as a constellation), the Magellanic Clouds, and, of course, the Southern Cross.

Orion was high in the sky, but upside down, with his dogs playing dead in the air above him. In the Southern Hemisphere they call Orion "the Teapot' because his belt and scabbard look like one when seen upside down. The Maori see the upside-down Orion as a bird-snare, and the ship Argo as a war canoe with the Southern Cross as its anchor.

The Southern Cross is nowhere near as large as the Dipper, but it wasn't as insignificant as the deprecating comments I'd heard had led me to expect. It's roughly the size of Cassiopeia's Chair, and very bright.

I saw, or think I saw, Proxima Centauri through a telescope, plus several other neat southern-sky features, including a multi-colored cluster called the Jewel Box.

As wonderful as the stargazing session was, it meant that I was droopy and dragging all day on Wednesday.
At 1:30 p.m. or so I finally got organized enough to head out to get some lunch at Run 77, the great place that had let me read the book yesterday, and
as I walked through the reception building I stopped and chatted with Jovanna, a working holidaymaker who was working the reception desk.

I told her that I was planning to walk to the Alpine Hot Pools after lunch, if it were close enough that I could do it. She said it was about twenty minutes' walk outside of town (I mentally doubled it, of course, since I walk slowly) and, to my astonishment and delight, she offered to come and pick me up there after she got off work at 3. She said that she had walked there before, and that it was always hard to walk back after the water had relaxed you.

It's a good thing she did, as it turned out to be well over a mile outside of town. I think it may even have been closer to two miles. It took me an hour and a half to walk it. If I hadn't had her promise of a ride back to rely on, I would have had to turn around and return to Tailor Made. Even as it was, by the time I got there, I was wondering who had slipped the leaden weights into my swimsuit.
And then the entrance to the place was uphill, up a long flight of steps and a slope.

The clerk at Alpine Hot Pools listened patiently as I dithered over whether to pay $18 for access to the three Hot Pools alone, or $26 for access to both the Pools and the sauna and steam room. I had no interest in the sauna -- saunas aren't even safe for me with my lung problems -- but steam has always helped my lungs.

Finally she said, "You seem more interested in the steam room than the pools. Why don't you buy a ticket just for the steam room? That's only $10. If you decide that you do want to go into the pools as well, you can always come back to the desk and pay the difference, and we'll upgrade you.

I thanked her, and did just that. The steam room was a white rectangular room with an upper and lower row of L-shaped tiled benches. It would have held eight people comfortably and perhaps twenty if all the benches were filled, but I was the only one using it the whole time I was there. Steam rooms must not be very popular in the summertime.

I stayed for a full hour -- going in and out of the steam room, naturally. I think it did my lungs some good, though I am still coughing badly. This is clearly a particularly bad bout of chronic bronchitis; I think the trip to Chicago made it worse than it would otherwise have been.

I didn't see any reason to try the Hot Pools, especially as they all seemed to be in full sunlight. (I saw as I left that two of them did have tiny patches of shade.) Jovanna (bless her!) did come and get me.

I was so tired that I had trouble fixing supper. First I didn't turn the oven on, a mistake I didn't spot until it was time to turn the meat, and then I burned myself slightly trying to take the pan from the oven. A very kind man got it out of the oven for me and even offered to clean the pan for me.
(I was busy holding my hand under the cold water faucet.)

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