The Inland Route

After a week of farming near Christchurch, we rented a "micro-campervan" (read: station wagon with a mattress and a stove) for 11 days and headed south, on the inland route. Snow-covered mountains, miles and miles of sheep, rolling green hills, and golden poplars around every corner. In pretty much the center of the South Island are two glacial-fed lakes, Lake Tekapo and Lake Pukaki, which The Rough Guide to New Zealand describes as an "opaque, pale blue sheets backed by the glistening peaks of the Southern Alps." (I couldn't have said it better myself.) We hiked up to Mount John Lookout to see more glistening alps from higher up: through a lovely pine forest, then up a glorious hill of gold grass. The wind just about blew us over on the way down, but the breathtaking panoramic vistas were fantastic.
Aoraki: "cloud piercer." When the sky father married a new wife (the earth mother), his four sons came to inspect his new wife, circling around the earth mother in their waka (canoe). However, they made a mistake while making their incantation to return to the heavens, and their waka crashed and upturned and turned to stone. The four brothers climbed the canoe, and they too turned to stone. Aoraki, the eldest brother, towers over his brother peaks (Mount Dampier, Mount Teichelmann and Mount Tasman) in age, height, and spiritual status as an Atua (god); however, all of the mountains are seen by Maori as deserving of veneration.
The day after climbing up to Mount John Lookout, after driving past hundreds of beautiful gold poplars in front of the gorgeous Southern Alps, we turned a corner on State Highway 8 and were caught by a stunning view of Aoraki Mt. Cook, the 3754m giant (the tallest in New Zealand) behind the pale blue Lake Pukaki. We were in awe. We studied the other side of Aoraki and Mt. Tasman a few days later, at sunrise. You can't reach the west coast from where Aoraki stands, although from there it is only 50km west to the Tasman Sea. The Southern Alps in New Zealand run almost entirely down the west coast of the south island, and for the most part the mountains are impassable. (So to see both sides of Aoraki Mt. Cook we drove south and then west, and then back north again.) If you ever get a chance to see the tip of a very tall mountain covered in snow at sunrise, take it.