River deep, mountain high!

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OK, so I haven’t updated this in a week, so lots to catch up on: I would get comfy and grab a coffee, this could be a long one! After coming up with my title, I now have that one line from that song in my head - very annoying!

I have only added the bare minimum of photos on this blog - I can only updload 21 at a time to the server, and I'm on a really slow internet connection here so it's taken ages just to upload this lot - there are many many more photos of this, probably all showing the same but from a different angle - I will try to get the rest uploaded soon, but for now, just a random selection.

Monday 23 February

Leaving Christchurch, it was a fairly nice morning, but once I hit the road south, it all became a bit gloomy, and stayed that way much of the day - this was going to be mainly a day in the van on the road, so that didn’t matter too much, although I was getting a bit mesmerised by the window wipers!

I stopped off in a little town called Ashburton just for a rest, and had a wander, and bought some ANZAC biscuits at the bakers. I’ve made these myself before, although they never tasted as good as these ones do! That got me thinking that despite all my talking about food (and of course eating it) in HK, I didn’t buy a recipe book, so I decided I would have a look and see if I could find myself a New Zealand cookbook, and re-start my international collection. I don’t know when I’ll make anything from it though - I remember buying a book in Zakynthos after eating the Kefalonian meat pie, and still haven’t made anything from it, but you never know.

Another couple of stops here and there and I ended up at Lake Tekapo, my stop for the night. This is a lovely little village, set on the lake of the same name. Now, my pictures don’t show it, but, the lake (and many others in the area too) is the most amazing turquoise colour you can imagine, and it’s all to do with ‘rock flour’! Well, my experience of mixing flour and water makes glue, but not here! It turns out that rock flour is really bits of ancient rocks ground up by glaciers on the move when the basin of the lake was being created - I think there is probably more science to go in there, but I’m struggling to remember it - this is why I shouldn’t leave my blog so long before writing, I know. Someone will get a postcard showing just how brilliant blue it is. I’ve posted off another batch of postcards this week - I wouldn’t pay too much attention to the nonsense written on the back of them, I’m really just sending them so that you can see some proper pictures of the places I’ve been, especially for when mine don’t come out so well, but I don’t just want to send blank postcards either!

At the head of the lake, there is the Church of the Good Shepherd, which is a tiny little church used by 3 Christian denominations for their services. Most of the back wall of the church, behind the altar, is a big window, which looks out onto the lake. It’s a lovely setting for a church, but with this window you wouldn’t mind if the priest’s sermon went on and on for a while!

I’m now in Mackenzie country, named after a guy called Jock McKenzie: he was a sheep farmer in the 1840s, he was later convicted for sheep rustling but on appeal this was quashed as the original trial was considered to be unfair, and so he became a bit of a local legend - so much so that they named the region after him with a slight change in the spelling of his name. This is big sheep station country, and just a little bit further along the lake shore from the church is a statue of a sheepdog, dedicated to the working dogs of the region, without whom sheep farming in the area would be pretty difficult, if not impossible.

After settling into my campsite, I headed along to the local outdoor hot pools - these one’s aren’t natural springs like the ones in Hanmer Springs, but are heated up glacier water pumped into 3 different pools, each shaped like one of the natural lakes in the region: Lake Ohau, Lake Pukaki and Lake Tekapo, each getting hotter and hotter. It was raining while I was in there, but that doesn’t really matter - you’re going to get wet anyway! It was a little bit chilly moving between the pools, we are up in the mountains after all. They are open all year round, so you could come here even if it was snowing! I found myself wishing I could get myself a little hot tub in the back garden at my house, although considering I have neighbours very close on either side, and a playground over the back fence that might not be such a good idea!!

Tuesday 24 February

Today I left Lake Tekapo and headed towards Aoraki Mount Cook National Park. My first stop along the way was to the Mount Cook Salmon Farm, which is the highest salmon farm in the world. I fed some fish with those smelly pellets, and I swear I can still smell it on my hands (and yes, I have washed them, several times, before some smarty pants suggests that)! I bought some smoked salmon for tea, to see if it tastes any better for being raised so high up. It tasted pretty good, although not being a smoked salmon connoisseur, personally I couldn’t taste any difference to any other smoked salmon I’ve ever tasted. I don’t think I’ll be earning any commission from them. My next stop was at Lake Pukaki, another of these lakes with the rock flour and the brilliant colour. Here there was more explanation about the legend of Jock McKenzie, and it was here that I learned that he was pardoned, whereas every other account I had read led you to believe that the area was named after a sheep rustler.

By late morning I had turned onto the Aoraki Mount Cook NP road, and after seeing come great scenery along the way, rounded a bend and caught my first glimpse of the mighty Aoraki (aka Mt Cook - personally I prefer the Maori name for the mountain, so that’s what I’m going to use). Aoraki means ‘cloud piercer’ and this is exactly what it was doing as I rounded that bend - what a sight - I couldn’t believe it - I knew before I came here that often people leave disappointed that they never see it because of the cloud. For the rest of the road in, I pretty much had a great view of Aoraki and the other mountains surrounding it, sometimes in cloud and sometimes not - it was like a game of hide and seek, although I was always the seeker! Thankfully it is a nice easy road up to the village, and there are lots of places to pull up along the roadside to stand and gawp, which I did.

Although the Aoraki Mt Cook National Park is managed by the DOC, Aoraki itself is ‘owned’ by the Maori people as it is of huge cultural significance - this was handed back to the tribe as part of the reparation in the late 1990s for the breaches of the Waitangi treaty which I think I may have mentioned in earlier blogs.

I took myself to the DOC (Dept of Conservation (and not ‘conversation’ as I’ve been calling it for days!)) and got myself booked onto a trip this afternoon to see the Tasman glacier terminal face and terminal lake. I joined my bus for the short ride to the blue lakes car park, then we had a 20 minute walk to the terminal lake. We were being divided into our boats, and I was asked since I was on my own if I would mind joining a larger group of 12 so that they didn’t need to split a couple or another group - I was quite pleased as it meant I didn’t need to go on a boat with the annoying American children (well they were probably about 19 or 20!) but I’ll tell you about them in a minute. My boat was a group of 12 who were about to embark on a cycling expedition from Aoraki Mt Cook NP to Christchurch, but not on standard road bikes - they are members of a historical bike club, so most of them are doing it on penny farthings! They were a great bunch, and took me in like one of their own. One couple was on their honeymoon, and her parents were also there too - they had been on another glacier trip somewhere else and all the people on their boat then had commented that what they needed to round off their trip nicely was to be able to have a whisky on the rocks, quite literally (on that trip I can’t remember where, they were allowed off their boats to stand on the glacier, or one of the huge carvings, but we weren’t allowed to do that); so, out she came with a set of plastic tumblers and a big bottle of whiskey! We sidled our boat up beside an iceberg, chipped off some ice and toasted our trip! Brilliant - I definitely got picked for the right boat! We spent some time around the lake, looking at lots of different icebergs that have been carved off the glacier, and learned bits about them - a couple of weeks ago, there was one of the largest carvings of this glacier recorded (that’s when a bit of the glacier breaks away and becomes an iceberg), there was also another slightly ‘smaller’ one, although smaller is a relative term - the biggest one is about 500m by 400m, and the other one not much smaller from what I could see. You might get some of it on the BBC news fairly soon as they had a film crew out along with many other news channels, but if you want to know more about it you can go to the TVNZ website where apparently there is a good bit about it. Since I haven’t seen a TV in weeks, and have only really glanced at a newspaper, I was none the wiser about this! My version of current events at the moment is limited to what’s for tea, what’s for breakfast and what am I doing tomorrow!! Our trip took us right up to the terminal face of the glacier, but for the first 10km all you can see is rock, and then it turns a corner, so you can’t see much from the lake - but, the icebergs are pretty amazing; some are massive, others tiny, some are pure white, others have melted away enough to show all the rock and debris it collected on its way down the slopes and into the lake; freshwater icebergs are different to saltwater ones in that you only see 10% of the iceberg on top of the surface, the remaining 90% being below the water line, so some of these we saw would be massive if you could drain away the water (salt water icebergs I think are 1/3 above and 2/3 below). We were encouraged to stick our hands into the water for a little while, just to see how cold it was - pretty nippy, wouldn’t want to be falling in! Anyway, that leads me to the Americans - there was a group of about 6 of them, all around 19 or 20 I think, and on the bus on the way over they had been chatting about going for a swim in the terminal lake; of course, nobody really thought they were serious, I’m not even sure half the members of the group were serious when they said it. We had started our walk back to the car park when we heard a splash, a few deep gasps from the crowd around and then the girliest scream you can imagine! One of the boys had jumped in just by the jetty - well, he made a very slow walk back to the bus and he looked like he was suffering; I can’t imagine how cold he must have been - the guides had been telling us that they have to do man overboard rescue practice in their training, but even they don’t go in without full warm dry suits on!

My campsite for my time here is at Glentanner, about 20km from the village. On arrival I was told that there was a big school group coming in to stay in the bunk rooms - my heart sank, all I could picture were hordes of screaming children let loose and running amok amongst the campsites and banging on van windows, but I thought I’d stay for one night and see how it went, and if it was that bad then I would go to the DOC site in the Hooker valley and run the risk of not getting a hot shower, or, if it was really bad, book myself into the Hermitage (that would have to be a last resort - it’s a pretty pricey place)!

Wednesday 25 February

Well, my fears over hordes of marauding children were unfounded - they arrived exhausted after a day at school then a pretty long bus journey, had their tea, had a run about for a bit then got settled into their dorm rooms and I didn’t hear a peep from them - I think I like these children! Today I went hiking in the National park. Now, obviously I would love to tell you that I climbed all 3754m (well over 12,000 ft - so around 3 times Ben Nevis) of Aoraki, but I’m pretty sure nobody would believe me! Instead, after a leisurely morning I took a hike along the Hooker valley taking in the changing scenery around me - somehow the clouds don’t seem to matter - I’ve seen all the perfect blue sky photos on the postcards of all the mountains, but the clouds add a little something extras I’ve decided, which is just as well, since they are a prominent feature in most of my photos!! This walk took me past the terminal lake of the Mueller glacier and up to the terminal lake and face of the Hooker glacier. The icebergs in the Hooker terminal lake were just like ice cubes compared to those from the Tasman glacier yesterday, but then, since the Tasman glacier is the largest in NZ, that’s only to be expected. My walk took me across some swing bridges over some rushing rivers, swollen by the rain and snow. The walk had passed by the memorial to the climbers who have been killed on these mountains, and that was a sobering and sombre thought - many of them very young, too young. I heard several avalanches and rock falls in the mountains beyond - that was quite eerie, and each time you just say a quick prayer that nobody was near it at the time. There had been a lot of rain over the last couple of weeks in the village, which of course means that at the higher levels in the mountains, there was a lot of new snow, and so, the avalanche risk was pretty high. My walk today was mainly along the valley, so no snow at my level.

While I was making a late tea/supper, I got chatting to many of the parents from the school camp - they were all really nice and were trying to feed everyone in the camp as they had made too much food! One of the dads, a policeman, was trying to get his group of boys into bed, and was doing his scary policeman routine - at one point I thought I was being sent to bed too! He then cottoned on to the fact that I’m not used to being around children and found this hilarious - he thought I should join them on their trip the next day since it turned out we were going to roughly the same place!

Thursday 26 February

More hiking planned for today - and it looked very promising for the weather - we had been lucky yesterday with it staying dry all day, son keeping fingers crossed for a mainly dry day, I set off. My first walk was just a gentle bush walk which then linked up with my second walk. When I set off on the bush walk, the children from one of the school buses were getting out their notepads and getting their instructions on how to safely take a sample without causing further damage (you’re normally not meant to take samples in the Park, but they had DOC approval), I waved and set off, leaving them to it! My second walk was to climb Mt Sebastopol, which was used as the backdrop for Gondor in the LOTR films. From what I’m told, this was the backdrop and then the white castle was added later by computer graphics, I’ll need to watch again to remind myself. This was a good hike, although lots of steps - there are lots of gullies and trenches around the mountain, and the safest path up avoiding these is pretty steep in places, so they have cut in a lot of steps into the hillside. The great thing about hiking somewhere new and also somewhere so beautiful is that there is always an excuse to stop to take a photo and get your breath back! Since the cloud was continually shifting, the view was almost constantly changing, so lots of photo stops for me! When I got to what was for me the top (I wasn’t going to the real summit) I was rewarded with some pretty amazing views - the clouds that had been closing in on me on the way up, cleared giving great views of the surrounding peaks and the village and the valleys below. I sat for a while, took many photos and then began my descent.

I had planned to do a 3rd hike this afternoon, and did make a start on this, but after about 30 minutes of scrambling I saw what was coming ahead of me, and, perhaps it was just because I was tiring, but it seemed like all I was doing was clambering over huge rock after huge rock, so I headed back - I’m on holiday after all, I should be having fun, and this wasn’t fun for me. Maybe if I’d done this one first this morning, it would have been OK - who knows; another day I will climb this, although probably not on this trip - a good excuse to come back another time!

I did some other short walks in and around the area, all taking in great views - to be honest, wherever you stand here, you get great views, you just might not always be able to see them through the clouds!

Back at camp, I realised that, apart from the walk I turned back on, I had really done all of the walks that I would tackle on my own, and so, I would be moving on tomorrow. This is somewhere that at some point in the future, I hope I’m able to come back to - I’d love to be able to tackle some of the higher peaks with one of the alpine guides. I’m not sure I really know the words to convey what it’s like here - the school camp had been on the glacier trip this afternoon and their ‘homework’ was to create one of the diamond shaped poems, I can’t remember the real name for it, and they were to come up with their verbs and their nouns for it. I tried something similar in my head for the mountains and the park, but nothing I came up with really seemed adequate. The Kiwis use the word ‘awesome’ a lot, and this is an awesome place, but I’m not even sure that covers it - I think the best I can do is say that for me (and I know that this won’t be true for everyone), but for me, it’s a pretty special place.

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