big south trip: day 6

Day 6

Omarama to Christchurch

I think I'm mostly going to let the pictures speak for themselves for this final day of the trip and attempt to keep the narration brief. This is the morning view from our bedroom window in Omarama:

While Ann was packing her bag before breakfast, I chatted with the owner of the hostel and discovered that Mt. Cook National Park (the only one of the nine South Island National Parks that I hadn't yet hiked in) was only an hour out of our way, and that the road was not in fact layered in ice and snow as had been my assumption. We didn't have much on the agenda for today anyway, being our "return home" day, and planned to find a short hike (1-2 hours) in the park. We lingered much too long at the visitor center (it was like a free museum) flipping through biographies of the 200+ people who have lost their lives on the mountain, most of whom had extensive mountaineering backgrounds. Mt Cook is New Zealand's highest mountain and was the training ground of Sir Edmund Hillary before he became the first to summit Everest.

So we completed this one-hour hike up to Kea Point, which gave us a view of Mt. Cook (left) up the Hooker Valley, only to decide that what we really wanted was to get beyond the wall of glacial debris across the lake and get a view of the mountain from the much closer Hooker Lake, which would add three hours to our hiking. It wasn't a difficult decision, as we had no desire to leave this gorgeous mountain setting before we absolutely had to.

Our wandering at Mt. Cook took the place of some short hikes that we'd planned at Lake Tekapo, two hours up the road, but we clearly made the better choice. We arrived in Tekapo just in time to snap a couple of sunset pictures at the famed little lakeside church, then drove the final hours home in the exhausted silence that signals the end of a long trip.

I have got to find a way to travel for a living.

-Rachel