From Geraldine the road turned west and inland. The scenery changed to rolling hills of grey soil covered in tussocky yellow grass which looked much more beautiful than the description would have you believe.

Almost in the centre of the South Island is Lake Tekapo. It is a huge turquoise lake which was incredibly still and offered lovely reflections of the surroundings. The colour of the lake was emphasised by the yellow, autumnal willow trees that lined part of the shore. The water has a slightly milky colour due to fine rock sediment washed in from glaciers (produced by 'rock-on-rock action' according to one info board). We ate lunch sat on a boulder looking out over the lake then joined the throngs of camera-and-tripod-wielding-taking-photos-of-anything-and-everything-Japanese-tourists admiring the statue of a collie dog and the small church on the lake shore; the collie dog was in honour of the contribution made to the area by sheep dogs. The Japanese tourists really do take photos of anything and are to be found all over; they pull up in coaches of about 20 and they all get out, set up their huge lensed camera on a tripod and take 100's of photos of things. These things can include views, views with them in the photo, signs, information boards, their friends, grasses in carparks, Anna, a baby, a little blond girl pushing a baby in a buggy and roads. A lot of them also use a hand held camera at the same time as the tripod, just to be sure they're not missing something. It's quite a strange phenomenon!

We then took the short but steep road up Mt John which was by the lake. It was just over 1000m high and had a small round peak which we walked around. There is a university observatory and cafe on the top and we had a fantastic cup of tea while admiring the spectacular scenery all around us.

Feeling inspired by the views from Mt John and eager to find mountains to play in we carried on to Mt Cook. This central area of NZ is home to some huge lakes which have been linked with massive canals to provide hydroelectric power. The road passed Lake Pukaki which was another turquoise, glacial lake and we turned right towards the snow covered Mt Cook which dominated the view for the rest of the day's driving as we went up the valley. Mt Cook (Aoraki in Maori) is the name of NZ's highest mountain and also the small settlement at the base and we arrived at the campsite just in time to see the last of the day's light catch Mt Cook (the mountain).

The following morning we took the short track (NZ doesn't have paths and rights of ways but tracks that come with descriptions of what you can see, the difficulty and the length of time it takes, which is quite useful) to Kea point. We sat there above another beautiful blue glacial lake and watched as the sunlight gradually warmed the clouds and caused them to break up, revealing Mt Sefton, another rather high, snow covered peak. As we sat watching there were occasional rumbles as bits of snow and rock fell down the mountain, everything considered, it was a pretty spectacular way to spend the morning.

In the afternoon we looked around the DoC (Department of Conservation, like a nation-wide national parks body) visitor centre which gave info on the geology and history of the area, which was interesting and we felt partially justified the quite high campsite fees. We then took the short drive into the Tasman valley to do another short walk to see a lake with icebergs. (You may notice that the name Tasman keeps cropping up - Tasmania, Tasman Sea, Tasman Glacier, Abel Tasman National Park, he was a Dutch explorer in the 1600's who sailed over this side of the world and was either not very modest or lacked inspiration when naming things). The lake was spectacular, the icebergs were a combination of blue, white and grey and the glacier's terminal face was at the end of the lake. The glacier itself was very dirty and not as pretty or colourful as Fox glacier - more of which later. It was astonishing how quickly the glacier was retreating but even weirder was the utter lack of scale that we both felt. Looking out over the lake there was nothing that we knew the size of and nothing man-made to act as a reference; according to the information board the lake was 5kms long but it looked much smaller than that.

We returned to the car and set off back towards Lake Pukaki. Anna thought that the scenery looked familiar, and not just because we'd driven up the road the previous day, and was proven correct when we found that the valley had been used as the setting for Minas Tirrith in the LOTR films. There will be more filming location spotting to come... We headed south to our next campsite at Omarama.

Josh