Our next stop was the breath taking Lake Tekapo, so large it looks like an ocean. The water is crystal clear and shimmers under the sun bright turquoise. The first thing we did when we got there was to walk down to the lake and take in the sights. We have a self contained solar power camper but every 4 or 5 days we have to go to proper campsite to charge up and dump our waste and water etc. Whilst at Lake Tekapo, we used a power site and plugged in charging up everything we had. We spent the day watching movies and shows on the laptop as we had unlimited battery for the first time since we hit the road. It was great! We made use of all the appliances we can only use when plugged in and got to use our microwave!...This may not be a big thing to you but if you have ever been in a camper for a long time you will know how great it is to finally be able to simply heat things up in the microwave and not use our gas!

We then headed to the famous Mt Cook, where we (Mainly Antonio) were looking forward to trekking up some part of the mountain and doing some of the walks on offer. The weather was terrible though and as we were arriving we are pretty certain we saw a really small tornado about half a kilometre inland from the road! As you can guess we pretty rapidly gave up on the trekking idea and only after we got there did we find out that they had severe weather warnings for that day and the next! Great!!!! We found a campsite and tried to get settled, but the gale force winds were not helping with this. We spent a very nervous night in our camper as the winds were giving it every effort they had to tip us over! Although we came pretty close on a number of occasions we managed to survive the night without tipping over. We decided to head off in the morning and although we were a little disappointed about not being able to do much around Mt Cook, we were still pleased to have seen it.