Lake Tekapo

I physically collapsed at the town Te Anau and stayed there healing in a cosy homestay hostel called Rosie’s. I guess my tiredness of post-internship period with a mixture of traveling anxiety had caught up with me.  In addition, I guess that is also the price you have to pay for paradise: foreign pathogens. Luckily, I was not suffering from fever. I just caught a rather intense cold and my muscles were very weak. I spend some quiet days for a week inside reading my book. Fortunately, I was feeling much better when I left Te Anau to meet up with Onno in Queenstown. It was really nice to see each other again after being six months apart. My solo traveling days are over, and now I have a traveling buddy for my remaining days. It’s nice to have a companion here. It was unbelievable, but I really needed to adjust myself into speaking Dutch again. I am rather talkative, but due to not having spoken Dutch for a while now I just kept stumbling on a lot of words. We had one day to spend in Queenstown and we took a gondola to Bob’s peak, which granted us a nice view of the valley in which the city lays.

 The following day we took the bus to our next destination: Lake Tekapo. This lake has a very characteristic turquoise colour. Interestingly, the ice glaciers of the mountains that shape this lake crush the rock particles with such a large force that it creates dust particles through a grinding process. Consequently, this rock flour sediment floats on the glacial melt water and refracts the sunlight beaming down with a blazing turquoise colour. Later that day, armed with torches we made our way in the black of the night to experience the region’s glorious night sky from atop nearby Mt. John. It was a very clear, quiet night and a lot of southern hemisphere stars were amazingly revealed.  After doing a beautiful four hour hiking track the next day, we soaked our tired bodies into the hot pools of Tekapo. Now we are staying at Mt. Cook village. To be continued…