Star-struck in Tekapo
PHOTOS: BROOK SABIN The six rooms are all designed to celebrate our biggest mountain – the entire front of each suite is glass, with a huge bath and bed positioned to take in the view.
When we arrived the night before, Mt Cook was behind a wall of cloud, as if being pampered behind a white curtain, waiting for her grand entrance.
That entrance came the next morning. We lifted our heads to see the sky a blazing hue of pink, with Mt Cook’s mighty snowcapped frame shooting into the sky above the clouds.
We’ve seen Mt Cook as a distant speck while flying, but seeing it in front of us – all reflected on Lake Pu¯ kaki – sent a shot of adrenaline through the legs: get up.
Things were about to get even more spectacular: what’s better than looking at the heart of the Southern Alps? Flying over it.
Fast-forward a few hours, and seven of us are in an Air Safaris plane, weaving between an elaborate maze of snow-covered ridges, jagged peaks, valleys, cliffs, and glaciers that look like giant frozen waterfalls. There are more than
3000 glaciers in the Southern Alps, and this is the best way to appreciate them.
The highlight of the flight was getting so close to the peak of Mt Cook that our plane was buffeted by the winds that swirl around the mountain. We know plane trips like this are relatively expensive for Kiwis, who think free access to beauty is a birth-right, but unless you’re into extreme mountaineering, this is the best way to appreciate the raw power of nature that formed the backbone of the South Island over 45 million years.
Back on the ground, we decided to drive to a lavender farm one of our fellow European passengers had been raving about. We always perform a mental karate chop when a foreigner tells us about something to see in our own country: surely if it was good, we’d know about it.
But we were wrong. We’d never heard of it, and it was stunning. It’s the biggest organic lavender farm in the southern hemisphere, a huge patch of purple that is a vivid contrast to the snowy whites and bright blues your eyes become accustomed to