After leaving our community campground in the sweet little mountain village of Mount Somers we continue on our journey south through the Canterbury district and on to Mackenzie Country. We are accompanied the entire way by ranges of scenic mountains to the right hand side of our route and when we reach Mackenzie Country, the scenery becomes more spectacular. The turquoise lakes of Tekapo
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and Pukaki
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are filled with glacial moraine which, when ground down by the water, gives them this unique colour. They are glacial lakes which lead tantalisingly up to the peaks of the Southern Alps beyond, including the highest of them all, Mount Cook.
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Mount Cook or Aoraki, it's Moari name, is the tallest mountain in Australasia at 3,750 metres. It's an impressive peak, however, having trekked to over 5000 metres in Peru and seen the Andean range we don't reckon it's quite on the same par! (I begin to realise we were pretty spoiled by the awesome scenery we encountered in South America). Minas Tirith, the city from the Lord of the Rings, was set in the plains of the Mount Cook valley though, so we're pretty 'psyched' (as they say) by this and the fact that we meet a real life ork from the original movie! He now works at the alpine gear store in the Sir Edmund Hillary Centre but was conscripted to become one of the 300 ork extras when Peter Jackson and his film crew came to town. The whole valley was closed off and, I would guess, virtually all the local men would've been invited to don makeup and costume and try out their roars for the camera. Unfortunately the weather doesn't want to do justice to the glacial scenery in front of us, clouding the tops of the ranges pretty much all day and throwing down plenty of rain, so much so that we're forced to spend most of our day in the Sir Edmund Hillary Alpine Centre, watching a 3D film of a scenic flight over Mount Cook and a couple of Planetarium movies on the stars of the Southern Hemisphere night sky and space travel. We learn that Edmund Hillary, the New Zealand born first man to conquer Mount Everest, used Mount Cook and surrounding ranges as a training ground for his larger expeditions and has had a bronze statue of himself as a young climber erected in front of his alpine centre at the base of Mount Cook. Although it rained and there were gale force winds, we were lucky enough first thing in the morning, to make a quick pilgrimage to the snout of the Tasman Glacier and it's glacial meltwater lake, Lake Tasman before the rains got too heavy. .jpg)
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We climbed over moraine boulders through the glacial valley where the glacier has been retreating. This was obvious from the large stone cliffs on either side of the valley, showing where the gigantic glacier had pulled away from. The Lake itself displayed many icebergs some of which are actually the tips of a mass of ice under the ground stretching 200 metre deep in places. We were unable to make the trek up to the neighbouring glacier in the Hooker Valley because of the weather so instead we opted to get on the road south to Dunedin, stopping at Omarau, a pretty Victorian town which, as luck would have it, was in the middle of it's annual Victorian fete. The boys on the gate were dressed in kilts, so we felt we had to attend! The town's history started with a trade in refrigerated shipping which brought in enough wealth to construct beautiful limestone buildings in the Victorian style. The fete was full of locals dressed in Victorian finery, traditional Victorian games and fine foods, music and even a competition, judged by the king and queen, for the best Penny Farthing cycler! The weather by the East coast had turned warm and sunny so, when we stopped at the famous Fleur's Place in Moeraki for seafood and ultra fresh fish, we felt like we were on holiday again sitting at our white tableclothed spot overlooking the small fishing harbour. I braved a shellfish hot pot, with large green mussels, scallops and welks and, as I'm not normally a seafood connoisseur, I think I did pretty well, to finish most of it! Greg thoroughly enjoyed his blue cod fillet but wouldn't touch the tiny cockels on the side of his plate, re-iterating his gastro motto 'No insects, no molluscs!'
