27/11–Dunedin and Lake Tekapo

We’d had a good long stay at Queenstown, but it was time to start working our way back to Christchurch for our flight to Sydney.

So back on the Magic Bus we got. Prior to Queenstown there’d been a fair few familiar faces each morning on the same itinerary, but our long stay in Queenstown meant that most people had already moved on and it was a fresh cast of characters on the bus.

Our next stop was Dunedin, a decent sized city (well, by South Island Standards) with a large student population. In fact, 40 odd years ago, Dunedin’s Otago University posed a dire threat to mine and my sister’s future existence…my Dad was due to move there from Malaysia to study his accountancy degree, but at the last minute changed his mind and went to England, where he met my mother. Out there somewhere, in a parallel universe, is a Chinese New Zealander, probably called Shane, who’s father is Sin Fook Chew and who has just gone travelling in the UK and blogged about how different life could have been if his father had studied in England!!!

Dunedin’s situated next to the Otago peninsular, a strip of land that juts out 30 kilometres in to the pacific ocean. The peninsular boasts a wealth of wildlife, including Albatross, Yellow Beaked Penguins, Fur Seals and Sea Lions, which we all got to see first hand on an evening wildlife tour. Unfortunately, I have no decent pictures to show as the little buggers were either too fast or too far away for my humble camera to deal with.

Moving on from the Dunedin, we spent our last two nights in New Zealand at Lake Tekapo. Just like Yangshuo in China, it was a perfect way to finish off our time in New Zealand.

There’s not of a heck of a lot to do in Tekapo, the town itself is tiny. In fact, it doesn’t even have a cashpoint, which necessitated some creative flexing of the credit cards in order to preserve enough cash in the wallet to pay for all the small stuff. However, that’s all good, as just walking the shores of the lake, smelling the pine cones and watching the Lupin and tall grass swaying in the breeze was pure food for the soul.

Lake Tekapo is a glacial fed lake and small particles of glacial silt suspended in the water lend it an icy light blue colour, quite spectacular when viewed against a backdrop of lush green hills and the purple and lilac Lupin flowers.

The McKenzie district, which Tekapo lies within, is named after an irrepressible Scot, who became infamous for rustling sheep from his neighbours and busting out of jail on numerous occasions. We heard numerous, slightly differing, stories of his various transgressions so he must have been quite the character.

This part of New Zealand has some of the clearest skies in the southern hemisphere and an observatory is situated at the top of Mount John, on the banks of Lake Tekapo. We’d already gotten wind from our fellow backpackers that an evening of star gazing on Mount John was not to be missed and duly signed up for an evening tour of the observatory.

Once again, we were very lucky with the weather, as we got up there on the first clear night in several days. It was a pure geek-out as the resident astronomers enthusiastically talked us through the night sky. Up there in the rarefied air, the night sky was revealed to us in all of its glory. We could see with the naked eye the international space station moving across the horizon, Jupiter, and also the stars of the milky way in such a proliferation that we thought they were clouds.

The astronomers told us of how the light from the stars were thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years old, owing to the vast distances being travelled, and that we were effectively looking back in time at the starlight. I felt once again, like a child, lost and wondering at the vastness of the universe, bittersweet in the knowledge that our own lives will be here and then gone in a blink of the eye and that of what little time we have, most of it will be spent twiddling with spreadsheets and writing yet more weekly frickin’ management reports.