Catching up (Lake Pukaki and Aoraki/Mount Cook)

On the day after Lake Tekapo, we drove along the north shore of Lake Pukaki, on the way to Aoraki/Mount Cook.  Aoraki holds a special place in Moari legend as the place where the "Big Canoe" of first Maoris in NZ landed and started their settlement of Aotearoa (Maori for NZ).  Cook is about 13,000 feet high, and with its several surrounding lower mountains seems to take up the whole sky in every picture of it.

The drive up the north shore of Pukaki gave us better and better views of Aoraki around every turn.  The picture above is still more than 20 miles from the base of the mountain.  You can also see the light icy-green waters of the lake nicely.

Once at Aoraki, we did some hiking near a glacier next to the mountain.  Even though the mountain was "right there" (right of center in the photo below) we saw very little of it because of its trademark veil of clouds.  Near the end of the hike it began to rain and the lower clouds obstructed nearly everything in the background, so we turned back to the parking area.

The drive back to Lake Tekapo was through some of the MacKenzie country used for LOTR shoots, so we let our imaginations run wild thinking we remembered this spot or that spot from the movies. 

Our LOTR Shooting Scene guide book tells us that most of the movies were shot on private land, and very few exact locations are revealed so that they are not trampled on by, well, people like us.  Nice food for the imagination, just the same.

After a second night in the little hut on Lake Tekapo we headed back to Christchurch excited by what we saw that weekend, and wanting to see more and more.  We will spend the next weekend in Christchurch, and then head out the next two weekends on tours back to Akaroa and then all the way across the middle of NZ to the West Coast, which we hear is another whole kind of beautiful from what we've seen so far.

Look for more, soon.

Mike an Terry.