Aoraki - The Cloud Piercer

We rise early and leave our maternity hospital room to have a quick nose through Geraldine's main street, a cute mix of craft shops and small grocers. Massive supermarkets are few and far between round here - there are fewer than 7 people per square kilometre in South Island, compared to 281 on the island of Great Britain - and small food shops abound. Is there anything not good about this country? We pick up a nice chunk of monkfish for about £5 a kilo. I repeat, is there anything not good about this country?

We drive out of Geraldine, westwards, and the scenery changes. This is Mackenzie Country, a huge grassy basin famed for its sheep farming. The drive is actually gradually taking us back towards the Southern Alps, and indeed against the gently rolling hills is a backdrop of rising foothills. We stop for a great little lunch at Fairlie, followed by a tasty ice-cream ("small cone NZ$0.50 - suitable for child or dog"), before we set off again towards Lake Tekapo. A large, turquoise-blue lake backed by the foothills, the lake is beautiful but the weather is overcast and we are obviously not seeing it at its best. Still, we have a nice gentle walk by the lake along a riding track - admiring the view and tranquil atmosphere. On the way back we come across a hapless pair of Chinese tourists who have attempted a little off-road driving and bogged their car in the gravelly shore of the lake. Whoopsie! On the shore of the lake is the Church of the Good Shepherd, more of a miniature chapel than a church, an adorable building and rare in New Zealand by virtue of its age - it was built in 1935...Young country. Accommodation at Lake Tekapo is a rather retro-looking prefab building which we share with three other couples from all over the world. A dinner of monkfish sauteed with pancetta puts the other guests' pot-noodles to shame...Why deny ourselves? - is what I ask myself.

The next morning is still overcast - not good for where we're going, unfortunately. Some distance from Lake Tekapo, we make a sharp turn northwards at Lake Pukaki, another alpine lake, heading towards a National Park that is home to one of New Zealand's undisputed landmarks. Aoraki - better known as Mount Cook. From the lookout spot just off the road along Lake Pukaki, nothing - New Zealand's highest peak is stubbornly hiding behind thick cloud. We press on regardless, and even though the star of the show is out of view, there is a great walk to be had along the Hooker Valley to the terminal of the Hooker Glacier. The track crosses a fast flowing river several times, precarious-looking swingbridges offering great views of the rushing waters. The flow slows down as we get closer to the glacier, and large chunks of ice start to appear, lazily floating downstream. We reach the lake at the terminal of the glacier, watching as chunks of ice break off the glacier face and plop into the muddy grey of the meltwater lake. No brilliant white, virgin ice here - this glacier has wound its way for miles through deep, V-shaped valleys, grinding the mountain away and tearing away rock. Heaps of rock - moraines - are scattered left and right on either side of the ice flow, the pulverised remains of mountains. This is enough to make anyone an ardent geologist. It begins to rain, a persistent and insidious drizzle, on the return trip, and we get to the car at Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park visitors' centre, quite, quite wet and cold. It's still 50 or so kilometres' drive back down the side of Lake Pukaki to the hostel we've booked (there being no reasonable rooms available near the visitors' centre), Omahau Downs, a beautiful rural homestead not far from the town of Twizel (who thinks of these names?). Typically, the sun makes a brief appearance and we're able to have dinner outside, using a huge up-ended cable drum as a table. The mountains finally show themselves.

The following day is our second chance to see shy Aoraki, but it doesn't start well. We wake up to find the cottage shrouded in dense fog, and have to wait a while before the visibility is good enough even to drive out. Before long, the fog suddenly lifts to reveal a brilliant blue sky - we make our hay and get back to the National Park as quickly as we can. This time the drive up Lake Pukaki is truly awe-inspiring: Aoraki is feeling brave today and revealing itself in its full snow-capped glory. We're not exactly equipped to scale a mountain on the scale of Mount Cook, but the long, steep and exhausting climb up to Sealy Tarns, a collection of utterly clear mountain lakes on a ledge high up on the Sealy Range, does us nicely. The Sun gets surprisingly hot, and loaded with our day-packs (containing mainly the many litres of water needed for the climb) we are huffing and puffing by the time we get to the tarns. We are rapidly revived by the view over the glaciers and mountains, including of course Aoraki. The air is pure and quite intoxicating. The mountains around us groan ominously - the ice and snow on their sides is shifting, hundreds upon thousands of tonnes of it. Avalanche warning signposts about here. The track climbs even further above the ledge to Muller Hut, but frankly we're knackered and we something tells us the clouds are on their way back. Before heading definitively back towards Twizel we make a short detour to see the front of the Tasman Glacier, a huge 29km long glacier which flows parallel to the Hooker Valley. Here the glacier is dirty grey all over, covered in the finely ground mountainside it has ripped off on its way downwards through the valley.

The fourth trip alongside Lake Pukaki is the last - we stop for half an hour in Twizel, a rather dull down which sprang up only a couple of decades ago as a service town for a large hydroelectric project nearby - and we head on through Mackenzie Country, entering the very north of Otago, which forms the south-eastern corner of South Island. With some difficulty and a few quick three-point turns in the middle of State Highway 8 - the roads are very quiet here - he find Buscot Station, a sprawling sheep(again)-farming station set in acres upon acres of grassland. Accommodation is in a beautiful, large house commanding a panoramic view of the hills and mountains in the distance. Our room resembles a hotel much more than a hostel - large and very comfortable. The cloud has rolled in and the evening sun projects thick shafts of light onto the hillsides - like sunlight pouring in through a cathedral's stained glass windows. The owner of the station is host to an apparently huge number of WWOOFers who lounge about in the house after their day's work like members of an extended family. There's a barbeque to use for free - no better way to watch the sunset than in Buscot Station's beautiful garden munching on barbecued chicken washed down with a bottle of Mac's wheat beer.

Some months ago it was my birthday. We were in Australia at the time, just about to visit Kangaroo Island. Tragically, I missed out on presents then. Today, then, is my belated birthday present. While in Opotiki I booked a glider flight with Southern Soaring, a large gliding centre and school in the small town of Omarama, only a few miles down the road from Buscot Station. Southern Soaring is equipped with a two-seater teaching glider, which is just as well as I've no idea what gliding actually involves, other than going up very high in a plane without a motor. My pilot for the half-hour flight is a Canadian expatriate who spends half the year (the better half) gliding on Kiwi thermals, and the other half (also the better half) on Canadian ones. It's jammy people like that who make you wonder why you spend your life as a wage slave, sitting at a computer for ten hours a day.

Firmly buckled down into the front seat of the glider - with what may or may not be a parachute strapped to my back (I didn't dare ask) - the towing aircraft trundles past and the rope is attached to the front of the glider. Take off is a pretty bumpy process: the glider doesn't stand very high off the ground. It's a very strange feeling indeed, being dragged up into the air by another aircraft. There's quite a lot of vibration until we reach the right altitude and the towing rope is suddenly jettisoned. Abruptly, all is quiet. As we circle over the farmland and hills surrounding Omarama, I realise with a start quite how disconcerting it is to be up here, this high, and to not hear the sound of an engine. Even though the weather is not brilliant, the view is fantastic - occasionally my stomach lurches as a thermal lifts us up. On a good day, the pilot says, the thermals can keep the glider up almost indefinitely: "the only limit is your bladder", apparently. I can see the attraction of spending all day up here - it's so peaceful, and on a clear day with the Alps in the distance, it must be utterly exhilarating. Slowly, slowly, the reading on the altimeter falls as we circle downwards. As for landing, it makes the take-off look smooth: it's a good thing I'm strapped in like a trussed chicken...

I'll definitely be doing that again some time soon. After a leisurely afternoon in Omarama, spent lazing about with our books in the hostel's garden, we spend a last night at Buscot Station before setting off bright and early the next morning. The destination? One of New Zealand's most talked-about places - Queenstown. Is it worth all the fuss, I wonder...

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