New Zealand's Weather Hates Us!

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It seems that after ruining our trip to the glaciers, almost killing us on the road back from Doubtful Sound and almost blowing our campervan over numerous times, New Zealand's weather decided to have one last, cruel laugh at us.

We took the long drive from Queenstown to Lake Tekapo via a couple of interesting stops. First off was AJ Hackett's Bungy Centre. Mr Hackett is the founder of bungy jumping and the gorge we stopped at allowed lunatics to jump from a bridge attached to some of Dawn French's knicker elastic for the bargain price of $100 dollars! After watching a few people take the plunge and a couple wimp out at the the last minute, we got back on the road and trudged on towards Mt Cook. The weather was beautiful, sunshine and very few clouds as we drove onwards through yet more beautiful scenery.

The weather held out as we drove along the beautiful road to Mt Cook Village, which should have made for some fantastic photos and the view of the tallest mountain in New Zealand that we had been craving since being denied by the storms at the glaciers. Well, it wasn't to be we reached the village and saw that the only cloud in the sky was a rather large one and was obsuring the main body of only one thing... Mt Cook!

Exasperated, we drove onwards towards the beautiful bright blue Lake at Tekapo where we camped for the night. The next morning we thought we would have a go at some open air ice skating near that lake, but were very frustrated to find out that depsite the snow, wind and ice we had encountered over the previous week, the ice rink was melting!! You couldn't make it up!!

We frantically searched our Lonely Planet guide book for something to do and discovered the Mt Cook Salmon Farm which was a short drive away. It may not sound the most interesting place in the world, but we thought we would catch ourselves some dinner and enjoy the views of the mountain ranges. Little did we know that gale force winds would close the only road to the farm!!

We cut our losses and decided to head east to earthquake damaged Christchurch for our last few days in this beautiful country.

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Photos

On the way to Mt Cook
Beautiful views of the mountain range, shame the clouds convergedon the one mountain we really wanted to see!

Comments

[GREG]

new blog
Great new blog and great pics....wish I was there with my camera......