Hello from Mount Cook YHA! It was very cold and grey in Queenstown this morning and the Remarkables had a fresh layer of snow on top, but I soon left the bad weather behind and headed for Mount Cook.
The Kiwi bus dropped me in Twizel where I picked up a shuttle to Mount Cook. On the way, we passed Lake Pukaki. The lake is an absolutely beautiful light blue colour! This is because the water in it comes from a glacier further up the valley, so although the rock flour from the glacier makes the water flowing down the valley look very grey and murky, by the time it's had a chance to settle in the lake, the heavier particles sink to the bottom and the finer particles left near the surface absorb all colours except for the beautiful blue reflected back.
By the time we reached the lake, the skies had cleared apart from a small fluffy cloud at the top of Mount Cook, a towering snowy peak in the distance. Mount Cook is New Zealand's highest mountain at 3754m. We were heading to Mount Cook Village in the national park at about 700m above sea level, which is also part of the World Heritage Site. There are only about 300 people living there in summer and 100 in winter, and the school has 7 pupils and 1 teacher! I want to be that teacher! You can only live in Mount Cook if you are working there, hence why not many people do.
On the way in to the village, I was so annoyed to have only booked one night here! The valley is spectacular and so peaceful and remote. There are plenty of great walking tracks and glacier activities to do. There's only one thing for it - I'm going to have to cram as much in as possible before my shuttle comes to pick me up tomorrow afternoon!
To that end, I booked an afternoon boat trip with Glacier Explorers (check out the website: www.glacierexplorers.co.nz). They took us out onto the Tasman Glacier Terminal Lake (Mt Tasman is NZ's second highest peak at 3497m.) the glacier itself is about 27km long and 6m deep, but it's rapidly retreating as it is melting more and more quickly. This makes trips more exciting though - we saw (and heard!) big icefalls where huge lumps of ice crashed down in to the lake, and although there weren't many out whilst I was there because of the direction of the wind, there are often big icebergs floating around the lake.
The ice was a really cool mixture of blues depending how much air was trapped in it, and what looked like steep slopes of rock around the lake were actually huge walls of ice reaching up to 100m - the layer of rock on top just keeps them from melting. The backdrop to the lake was incredible - there are such high peaks around here and as a result, there's a lot of snow around. Rockfalls, icefalls and avalanches are all very common (far from my hostel of course!) so it is a constantly changing environment.
After my boat trip, I had a bite to eat in the Hermitage Hotel and Cafe - home to the Sir Edmund Hillary Alpine Centre. Hillary was a New Zealander and of course, the first to climb Everest, but he did much of his training on Mount Cook! Somehow I don't think I'll be training up Mount Cook - I don't fancy falling down a crevasse!
I went for an evening walk up one of the shorter tracks to Red Tarns at 1050m. The track climbed very steeply up several steps to reach a panoramic view of the valley and Mount Cook, now completely clear. It was so magnificent that I just sat on a bench up there a while, taking it all in. It was the perfect time to go too as I saw a fabulous reflection of Mount Cook in one of the tarns as the sun lowered a little, great photo opportunity! I watched the sun disappear behind the peak just behind me and although most of the valley was still lit up, I could see the shadows gradually creeping up the slopes of the mountains on the other side. The temperature dropped quite rapidly so I didn't stay any longer and ran back down to the village.
It is so pretty and tranquil here, I love it. (Well, tranquil aside from the occasional sound of thunder when there's rock/icefall or a small avalanche!) I really struggled to decide which picture to put up for today as I have so many awesome ones from today so hopefully if I log on to a computer one day I can show you the rest...