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Published: December 21st 2010
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Snow Tussocks
Swarming over the hill like tribbles. Jovanna had offered to walk down to the bus stop with me, but I'd been vague about exactly when I planned to go. I checked out of my room at 10 a.m. and stayed in the lounge until 10:45. Then I became worried, knowing how heavy the luggage was and how slow I was at moving it, and I decided to start.
I looked around for Jovanna, but I couldn't find her. I asked Michael, the proprietor, if he knew where she was; he told me she was off today and he had no idea. Then, amazingly, he offered to drive me down to the bus stop.
Of course I accepted eagerly, and he took me down the hill into town. I had another ham, pineapple and cheese sandwich at Run 77, and began another interesting book, *Rabbits Galore*, about a man who made a career out of killing rabbits for sheep stations in the high country. Unfortunately I only had time to read a few chapters.
Just before noon, I came out of Run 77. There was Jovanna! She had thought I meant to go down around noon, since the bus did not leave till 12:40, and
when she heard I had gone she had come down into town to say good-bye.
It was wonderful to have someone seeing me off on the bus! I gave Jovanna my blog address and my e-address, and she was kind enough to buy me a parting hot chocolate at Reflections, another restaurant along the strip. (Jovanna, if you're reading this, I told you that the hot choc was cheaper at Run 77; I misspoke; it was the bottled water that was cheaper.)
When the bus left, I said a regretful good-bye to Jovanna and Tekapo. We had an older and quieter driver this time. I noticed with interest that we would have had a different driver even if I had continued on on Monday; at Tekapo the two buses, going in either direction, met, and the drivers changed buses, so that each driver would end up in his home city that evening.
The scenery between Tekapo and Cromwell was spectacular, and my photographs do not begin to do it justice. For the first hour there was the same sort of country as Tekapo's -- lakes, surrounded by clumps of lupine. The driver said the lupine was just
past its peak, so evidently I was here at exactly the right time to see it.
After that the mountains closed in, mostly brown earth and gray rock, with low green scrub straggling up their sides. Then we came out into a wide, flat, plateau-valley, much like Aurora back home, except that there were mountains fringing it on all sides.
That land was irrigated; our driver said that there was one irrigation-chain that was over a kilometer long. The irrigation allows it to support dairy cattle instead of sheep. The milk is good here, and I find it reasonably priced, though I saw on Stuff (a NZ news website) that milk prices are the highest they have been in years.
After that the road began climbing again, and we went through the Lindis Pass. Here the brown ripply mountains were covered not with green scrub but with tufts of golden grass -- "snow tussocks," the driver called them. He said this part of the road was often closed because of snowfall in the wintertime.
As we went back down, we returned to the green scrub country and then to green fields, mostly containing sheep.
Cromwell, two
Pinot Lodge
Carrick, my dorm thousand feet lower than Tekapo, is much warmer and wetter, even a bit muggy. It was raining when we left Tekapo (of course); it was still raining in Cromwell. I wore my tennis shoes for the trip and found that they became uncomfortably tight on the three-hour bus journey.
The owner of the Chalets, as the complex which houses Pinot Lodge is called, was there to meet the bus -- a surprise, as she'd told me to call when I got there. The Chalets is a huge place; it was once New Zealand's equivalent of a CCC camp. I am housed in what seems to be a girls' dorm, with a matching boys' dorm a short distance away. I do have a single, nice though somewhat institutional, with a very comfortable twin bed. There is another twin, unmade, in the room, and I have managed to push them into the shape of an L. (I'm not strong enough to turn them into a full double bed, but the L-formation should give me a bed-and-a-half, which is good. I have my own sink, a pleasant luxury, and commode and shower are right down the hall. The owners were kind enough to bring a space-heater at my request.
I went looking for a supermarket as soon as I had unpacked, but the Four-Square shown on Google is no longer there, and the little dairy that has replaced it is down a hill too steep for my knee. Defeated,
I gave up, considered eating at the one fast-food place I had seen -- a rather dodgy-looking place called Rainbow Takeaways -- and decided I'd rather try the bar at the Chalets. I had fish and chips -- pretty good actually, and good portions, though nothing like the free-range ham at Run 77.
The owners, who were running the bar too, came over and offered to drive me to the supermarket sometime tomorrow. That will be a great relief. The other problem of the moment is that the wireless Internet is down. I got in touch with Jim via kiosk, at the high price of $2 for 20 minutes.
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