Soon after publishing yesterday’s blog the Sun came out (at 8 o’clock at night!) and the clouds blew away revealing a full 360 degree panorama of mountains surrounding us. Despite the warm sunshine, the biting Antarctic wind whistled painfully around our ears and noses, a bleak reminder of that notorious Kiwi ‘wind chill factor’. All eateries were chockablock with customers as we wandered amongst the crowds of holiday makers there on the banks of Lake Wanaka, desperately searching for an evening feed. We eventually had to sit at an outdoor table and consume our quite-average meal from tin plates whilst rugged up tight from the icy wind.
To thaw our bones out we scurried back to our luxurious and very modern AirBnB in the suburbs for a magnificent long hot shower, and to snuggle up in the fabulously comfortable kingsize bed under a light feather doona.
This morning in the bright sunshine we meandered North towards Mt Cook. Once again we were surrounded by beautiful high mountains with glimpses of white stuff up high in some valleys, just as we like it. Whizzing past Twizzle (actually spelt Twizel) we thought that might be a good place to have a squizzle, but we continued on anyway towards those impressive mountains that towered in the distance, wanting get a bit of a wiggle on because some clouds were creeping in and threatening to occlude the view.
On the approach to Mt Cook we passed by an enormous turquoise lake, gleaming brightly in the sunlight. The milky blue colour comes from the powdered schist ground down by the glaciers, and this ‘rock flour’ gives the water a surreal hue that is very pretty to observe in such an enormous body of water.
Indeed, the small cold drops of rain began pelting at us, driven hard by the almost gale-force gusts of wind, thereby forming a very dramatic landscape. Georgie sensibly stayed sheltered in the warmth of the car whilst Rod recklessly wandered off in search of hidden gullies and alpine wonders.
The spongy wet ground-cover held far more than just mosses and ferns, there were multiple flowering and fruiting plants of mysterious forms, their berries all tasting quite palatable although this lad from the tropics was not brave enough to swallow any of those unknown fruits. With delightfully decorated mossy rocks and stunted beech forests in the foreground and enormous shadowed rock faces as a backdrop, the scenery had Rod in a state of bliss as he kept stumbling excitedly over new and fascinating plants.
The mountains began to reveal parts of themselves to us as the wind-driven clouds raced past their flanks. One moment a huge and dramatic sheet of ice would be seen reaching down a steep mountain side, then it was gone, enveloped in the swirling mists.
We drove around amazing roads with incredible views, stopping regularly to appreciate the immensity of it all. Rod walked up one steep hill to view the Tasman Glacier in the distance. If we had been here ten years before we could have been looking down on top of it, but like all of New Zealand’s glaciers it is retreating rapidly, about four kilometres every ten years.
Whilst Rod was scurrying about in the moss and beech trees, Georgie was doing a fine job of locating a place to ‘roll out the swag’ for the night. Delightfully she located a good AirBnB in Twizzle! Oh joy, we would get to have a sqizzle at Twizzle after all!
The weather had cleared by then, there was no drizzle, so we had a sizzle of a meal at the Twizzle pub, which was not a fizzle, we could not grizzle about it at all.
Click to big up the pics
Wow! Amazing distances in some of those pics. It looks sooo cold.
I wonder if those spiky plants were defending against the moas… or perhaps some other now-destroyed bird species. There were no mammals in New Zealand — it was a bird paradise. Interesting.