Mount Cook

We woke up this morning in our lodge that we never expected to stay in, and then were told that we couldn't stay another night since they were booked for a wedding. So we had to quickly find other lodging for tonight. Luckily, one of the Airbnb's I had inquired about last night got back to me that they had availability so he agreed that we could stay there even though it was last minute. I was surprised how difficult it was to find lodging; literally all the places we checked were booked solid. I guess it is prime time season and the weekend, but just so different from what we've experienced elsewhere in NZ. But all's well, we just had to pay a bit more than we intended.

After dropping our stuff off at our new airbnb we loaded up and drove 2 hours north to Lake Tekapo. We were able to go up to an observation area that looked over the lake and also had stunning views of the Southern Alps mountain range. We were told from that spot we could see 20 of NZ's highest peaks (out of 31 I believe is what he said). So we ate our picnic lunch up there and soaked in the view.

Then we drove another hour and a half to Hooker Valley by Mt Cook. It was a gorgeous 3 hour hike that took us along the mountain valley where we could see the 3 glaciers up above and then ended at Hooker Lake. The scenery and weather were just beautiful so we really enjoyed that. It was also a pretty easy hike; my garmin said we climbed about 50 flights of stairs which is much less than some of the other hikes we've done.

You can see in these pictures the water is really gray- this is because that's glacial water that's been grinding up the rocks, so the gray color is because of all the rock dust.

Then we drove back down to Wanaka and ate dinner at a fun bar/restaurant right by the lake. We enjoyed the food and the people watching. Then back to Lake Hawea for the night! We stayed up chatting and drinking tea with our host for a bit. He's a really interesting guy. He used to be a history professor at one of the universities here. He's published a few books and showed us one of them. He has a huge house here and rents out three of the bedrooms in the lower level, so there are two other groups staying here as well.

Off to Queenstown tomorrow!