Bad cold!! Alexandra - Glentanner. Am. nice day, sun and cloud. Went for petrol - drove to Twizel to Poppies - excellent food. Amazing clouds & Lake Pukaki V. blue. Good views of Mt Cook. Got to Alpine Lodge - walk up valley. Back to eat at Old Mountain Cafe - poor food & too much. Weird salad. Amazing views of mountains and glaciers.
One of the delights of taking a road trip in New Zealand is that the landscape is magnificent in scale it is also varied. Rarely do you travel more than half an hour without the topography changing, from lakes and mountains into rolling green hills, pastoral plains interrupted bt craggy river valleys. This was certainly the case driving from Clyde to the the Mount Cook Alpine Lodge, a distance of 140 miles that began gently, winding through green rolling hills then increasingly jaw dropping as we neared the Aoraki massif.
We were heading towards a world famous view, the sight of Mount Cook seen from the southern shore of Lake Pukaki. After downpours in Coramendel, a typhoon in Kaiteriteri, low cloud over the Haarst Pass and drizzle in Milford Sound it was looking as if our luck might change. We topped a ridge a few miles north of Twizel, there it was, the turquoise waters of Lake Pukaki stretching before us under a bright blue sky.
We stopped in car park at the foot of the lake. The light was amazing, but like most iconic vistas the reality is always different from the National Geographical stereotype. In the case of Mount Cook it was clear that the celebrated image from this particular viewpoint must have been taken using a telephoto lense the size of a drainpipe.as in reality the mountain is a mere speck on the horizon.
Lake Pukaki is 32 miles long, an icy blue sliver through increasingly wild rocky terrain. The road clings to the lower slopes of the western shore snaking around headlands, mounting low spurs, the view constantly changing, becoming ever more sublime as you reach the head of the lake.
For some reason this is the only photo we can find of the drive, there must have been others as they appear on our Facebook posts. As you can see it does deserve that most overused epithet - sublime.
I have found some video tucked away in a file - so I have strung a few of the shots together. I am sure we will return to New Zealand again, but will we return to Mount Cook I wonder? It is remote and there are places in New Zealand we have yet to explore. So, as a memento of a stunningly beautiful afternoon in the shadow of Aoraki -
Quite rightly there has been a real effort to avoid over-development around Glentanner and valley below Mount Cook. What this means is that accommodation is in short supply and expensive. We opted to stay at the Mount Cook Alpine Lodge which looks lake a modern chalet. The big glass windows in the gable overlook Mount Cook, very spectacular. Given the price tag the actual quality of the rooms themselves was a tad bargain basement. Maybe outdoorsy types prefer that. Similarly the food on offer from the nearby cafe was hearty rather than delicious.
Gill was still feeling under the weather so we took a stroll up the path towards Hooker Lake for a mile or two. There was a serious amount of geography going on hereabouts which is always going to please Gill no matter how ill she felt.
We chatted to a young couple who joined us at a particularly winsome viewpoint. The guy was from Wellington and the his partner from England, they were due to get maaried the following week. It turned out they lived in London, quite close in fact to our daughter. We discovered we had visited the same restaurants in Hackney and Stoke Newington. "Go to the Rasa on Church Street," we enthused, 'It does great Keralan cuisine'. A slightly odd conversation to have while admiring the wonders of the Tasman Glacier, but travel is not only about memorable places, but chance encounters and random conversations. We wished the happy couple well for their impending nuptials and went our separate ways.
We sensed our journey's end was beckoning, 'endishness' as Gill calls it. "This time next week we will be floating somewhere above Central Asia heading towards Heathrow," I observed. The final lines of Larkin's 'Whitsun Weddings' jangled through my mind,
"...it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain."
Epic landscapes can be magnificent, but belittling too, sometimes they are uplifting other times faced with Nature on a grand scale a sense of melancholy overcomes us, Larkin captures such diminishment perfectly.
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