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Published: March 4th 2014
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In the morning it was finally time to say goodbye to Queenstown, it was a dad day for me, I could have stayed there for much longer. We said our goodbyes to the only remaining survivors Max, Billie and Zoe then jumped on the bus. There had been a sprinkling of snow overnight on the top of the mountains surrounding Queenstown which made it look even nicer. En route to Lake Tekapo we stopped off at another lake which was the nicest, brightest, I've blue coloured lake I have ever seen! We then carried on to Tekapo which is known as 'The Gateway to the Universe' because it has some of the best views of space in the whole world. As I love space and stars (it fascinated me as a youngster) me, Freeman, Vicky and Shantelle booked to do the $80 star gazing tour at 11:45pm that night. When we got to Lake Tekapo the hostel was a lovely little lodge with the living room overlooking the beautiful lake, again a bright blue colour. Me, Freeman, Shantelle and Natalie all decided to be good as go for our first jog of our travels around the lake. I could tell I
was really unfit but it was nice to gently jog along the lake taking in the views. We then nipped into town to confirm our star gazing booking and all of the staff were complete weirdos (and that's me being polite)! Back at the hostel we showered and cooked a really nice curry. At 11pm we took the 1.5km walk in the dark to the star centre. Our guide picked us up and yes you guessed it, he was even crazier and weirder than the others, but at least this guy did it in a way that he was more like an over excited kid rather than possibly a serial killer. We reached a dirt path where he had to turn out all the lights as we were now in the star gazing territory, good job he knew the dirt path well as we couldn't see a thing. As we jumped off the mini bus it was a massive anti climax at first because it was really cloudy and we couldn't see any stars. We all sat around and our guides tried to teach us about the different constellations but it was annoying as we couldn't see many of the
stars. Finally the sky cleared and we used the various strength telescopes to get a much clearer view of the stars and I even got a good view of Jupiter. The most impressive thing I saw was two distant galaxies. They look like little white clouds but trough the telescope you could see that they are actually another galaxy, separate to our own, with millions more stars. It makes you feel tiny and insignificant! We got dropped off at the hostel about 2am and finally got into bed. I was shattered and freezing.
Up fairly early again in the morning I was tired but after having the classic beans on toast I felt better and it was back on the bus headed for the earthquake ravaged city of Christchurch.
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