We are in the Southern Alps and, after a good night’s sleep and a welcome hot shower in the hostel, we go on an hour’s or so walk up to the peak of Mt John. This is a former USAF base and spy station that now houses several observatory telescopes, as well as a café that serves marshmallows in their hot chocolate for chap lipped walkers. The lazy can drive up winding roads, so there is a fair quota of fat Americans up here too. On the way down, we divert to Alpine Springs, where Caz and I spend a half hour shifting between the 35° (C), 38° and 38 ‘plus’ degree hot pools.
After the walk, the hot springs and a tuna sandwich, I am feeling relaxed yet sprightly and youthful. This is quite disturbing feeling, so I resolve to go shopping for booze and fags before we settle down to camp for the night.
Leaving Lake Tekapo, we drive past Lake Pukaki, an even bigger blue lake, to Aoraki in Hooker Valley, home of Mt Cook, the highest mountain in New Zealand. The town, if you can call it that, is like an off season purpose built ski resort, though here the tourists are walkers or climbers. At the bottom of the brash hotel that dominates the resort is a statue and museum commemorating Edmund Hilary, for whom Mt Cook was his climbing school and who officially opened the resort hotel during the recent latter years of his life.
There are no shops selling food, so we eat at a lodge restaurant, which we figure is cheaper than the hotel restaurant, though not by a lot. Then we drive a mile or two to ‘White Horse Hill’ campsite at the foot of the path through Hooker Valley to the base of Mt Cook. In contrast, this campsite is very cheap at NZ $6 a head, being one of the national network of state owned campsites which we plan to be making the most of. And the setting, needless to say, is staggering.
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