Blogs from Mount Cook National Park, South Island, New Zealand, Oceania - page 13

This hostel is on the shores of the most turquoise lake you've seen, apparently caused by rock finely ground by glaciers. There's an observatory at the top of the hill which we visited - splendid view - but no tours running today. And a church on the promontary, but little else. last night we stayed in the old maternity hospital ina little town called Geraldine, where the largest jumper in the world is displayed, along with the bayeux tapestry made out of bits of old knitting machines. Sounds crazy, but looks good. They even designed the torn off end, which is lost!! I bought myself a wooly cardy and some socks, they have lovely stuff in this shop.Tomorrow, on to Mount Cook and the glaciers. Out with the vests - still in shorts so far. Pictures ... read more

Our helicopter took us up for a view of Mt Cook (NZ's highest peak at 3,000 meters). Torrie arranged for the clouds to part just as we flew by. We landed on a snowfield on another mountain top just across from Mt Cook for these pictures.... read more

Day 3 - Pictures only (finally figured out how to upload) Day 4 - Today finally got to sleep in a little. We picked up a rental car and started on a driving adventure (putting the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car is a mistake). We left Queenstown and headed North to Twizel. We arrived in Twizel around 4:00 PM at our B&B to find out there had been a mistake with the booking. Sandy & Ian at Aoraki Lodge were awesome they helped us find another room. We checked into our rooms and then rented some bikes for a ride around town, by the end both bikes had flat tires and Moe had a sore butt. We had drink at Poppies and then decided to come back for dinner after showers. The ... read more

We camped inside the Mount Cook National Park grounds, before doing a day of hiking towards the famous Mountain itself in the Hooker Valley. As we are not trained mountaineers we were not allowed to pick our way up the side of the mountain itself, but we did manage to complete a hike right through the national park, across the glacier valley, over swingbridges and then up to the foot of the mountain. As we were both taking pictures of lumps of ice that had broken off the Hooker Glacier and were slowly being washed down the river as they melted I noticed Thom was chatting to a rather dishevelled fella. As it turned out, he was an avid mountaineer who had decided to take the straightest route from Fox Glacier to the Hooker Glacier by ... read more

5th February 2008 Today we drove from Queenstown to The Hermitage in the shadow of Mount Cook. It has been bright and sunny from the start to the end of the day although there was some high cloud on the tops of mountains. Our first stop was at Arrowtown , an old gold town. Rather sanitized for tourists but pretty. We drove through the Gibbston valley which has a deep gorge where the Kawerau River flows and the flanks of the gorge are covered with vineyards mainly pinot noir grapes for burgundy. The next 100 km were through Mackenzie country which is hilly, barren and not much good for growing anything. It is still imposing as it is so desolate and quite dangerous when there is snow on the roads in winter. When the land flattens ... read more