If I was the New Zealand marketing person, my Kiwi Catch PhraseTM would be “It just keeps getting better”, because every time we are impressed by a view, sure enough, there is a better one around the next corner or the next day.
Mt Cook is incredible. As we drove the 3 hours from Queenstown, the first views looked great from a distance, but the closer we got, the cloudier it got.
It was awesome, but refer to the Kiwi Catch Phrase.
We did an afternoon walk along the Hooker Valley track which takes a lot of people to Hooker lake
where there is a view of Mt Cook and the end of the glacier.
We were lucky that our timing meant we were walking against the tide of people who had come by bus and were heading back somewhere. There was a lot of them.
If you are heading to New Zealand, it can be a little tricky finding reasonably priced accommodation in some places. We didn’t want to do a budget trip, but have found that Haka House hostels are fabulous.
They are really well set up with excellent kitchens, comfy beds, friendly staff and great fellow travellers.
It is the same reason I love cheaper hotels in India, you get to meet locals and people from all over. In the past I have been pressured into fallen for the “let’s have a night or two of luxury” and the hotel room feels like it could be anywhere in the world…not for me if I can help it.
Right now, at the other end of the table Erna is giving a water colour lesson to our German friend Christa, a Canadian (maybe soon to be an American) woman who makes awesome scrapbooks of her life and a Japanese man who was explaining calligraphy earlier. It just doesn’t happen at fancy hotels.
But…there is an air of disappointment in my life. My D7200 has some spots on the lens or the sensor or somewhere that I can’t seem to dislodge. Most photos they are hidden in the background, but when there is sky…well, look for yourself.
I am really happy with what I am learning about doing this, but as Lady Macbeth put it so well, “Out damned spot”.
All this preamble to get to the point that today we walked part of the way along the Sealy Tarns track but between her dodgy hips and my creaky knee we didn’t make it to the top of the 2,200 steps. Still it was a fantastic walk that included making the time lapse.
Back at the bottom we instead went to Kea Point lookout. It didn’t matter that we didn’t make it to the top because “It just keeps getting better”.
