February 1. So now we are at Mount Cook, the highest mountain in New Zealand. There is a National Park and a very interesting memorial to Edmund Hillary who started his climbing career here. The memorial consists of a museum with an excellent documentary of his life and all kinds of artifacts and information on other climbers e.g. the women who used to climb in knickerbockers in the 19th century! Neither John nor I knew much about Hillary, so it was very interesting - not only was he the first man to climb Everest, but he was also the first man to drive a motorized vehicle (a farm tractor) across the Antarctic! He developed a great love for India and Nepal and built many schools there (reminded me of “Three Cups of Tea”, Zoe!) There is also a planetarium and a 3D movie about Mount Cook which was really good. There is absolutely no need for us to get roped in to one of the MANY companies trying to get us to fly over the area in helicopters now that we have seen the 3D movie! The scenery here, of course, is amazing and THERE IS SNOW! (but not at the campground level, thank goodness!) I have been sleeping in my long underwear however - the temperature just drops as soon as the sun goes down. Our second day here, we walked out to Hooker Lake Glacier which was about a 3 hour hike, most of it over rocks and boulders it seemed. Both of our knees (all 4 actually) held up well, but it was very hot and we didn’t really have enough water. You would have thought we would have learned that particular lesson in spades in Australia. However we survived and the scenery along the way made it worthwhile. Although John did comment when we eventually got to the lake (full of ice chunks from the glacier) that he couldn’t quite see why we had gone to such lengths to avoid a Saskatchewan winter in order to go and see chunks of ice with snow covered mountains in the background! On the way out to the lake we passed the Alpine Memorial with the names of all those who had lost their lives on the mountain - quite a large number, mostly young men, obviously. They either fell or got caught in avalanches. Having seen in the Museum movie what is involved in climbing these huge peaks, it’s obvious that they have an amazing pull on some people - but not this one.
February 3. We drove to Omarama last night which is a small town between the mountains and the coast where we are headed next. I wanted to stay here because my trusty guide book had told me that there was a place called the Wrinkly Rams, and how could we not stop in to see what it was all about? It is in fact a really good restaurant (we had amazing lamb shanks for supper), a store where you can buy all kinds of woolen things (obviously we’re in sheep country) and they do sheep shearing demonstrations which of course we had to take in. James was a lovely man who explained about all the different breeds of sheep (I had no idea there were so many) and the different things their wool is used for (running from the very expensive Merino sheep to the run of the mill carpet sheep). Then he hauled out a most accommodating Merino ewe to shear for our benefit. We couldn’t believe how docile she was, although James did say that she was 5 years old and so had been through this a few times before. But she just sat on her bum and watched us while he whipped most of her wool off with electric clippers and then finished her off with old-fashioned hand clippers. so we could see both methods. It was fascinating to watch it fall - SO thick (and pretty grubby on the outside!) James also showed us a DVD on what happens from when the wool is on the sheep all the way through to finished woolen clothes - very interesting. (I’ve realized that I’ve used “interesting” a lot - but don’t have my thesaurus with me - and these things ARE interesting!) There was a newspaper article in the shop part of the Wrinkly Rams about a ram called Shrek who had evaded the muster for 6 years and had lived all on his own up in the high country until a shepherd happened to find him. When they brought him in to shear him, his fleece weighed over 25 kg because it keeps growing (some sheep lose their wool naturally, but Merino wool just keeps growing). James told us that when it rains, a Merino sheep can absorb up to 30% of wool weight in water - so poor old Shrek spent a lot of his time lying down because he was just too heavy to move! This is one thing that John DIDN’T take a photo of and he now cursing himself - Shrek really was a sight to behold - the wool on his chest was so thick you had to wonder how he had managed to get his head down to eat.
To get to Omarama, we had to drive through Twizel which is where some of the Lord of the Rings was shot. Not being Rings fans, we didn’t stop but you can’t avoid some of the publicity. I was amused to see that one tour offered the opportunity to use a “genuine replica” of the swords used in the movie - something of an oxymoron, methinks!
I’ve just sat John down and forced him to look at our itinerary with me! As most of you know, I’ve done a lot of research and reading over the past couple of years and have done nearly all the planning for this trip. But I’d spent most of my time before we left on thinking about Australia and had kind of left New Zealand to chance. Probably a good thing as I am finding that things are changing as we go more than they did in Australia. We’ve spent quite a lot of time in big cities and we about “big-citied” out. We are going to take the south coast road through Dunedin and Invercargill to get to Manipouri where we will pick up our Doubtful Sound trip, but neither of us are in much of a mood to deal with cities any more so we‘ll likely not spend much, if any, time in either place. Some of the little towns along the way look really interesting (there it is again!) so the plan at the moment is not to spend much time in the big places but take our time and putz around the coast. Our Australian friends, Reg and Ruby, are planning a trip to New Zealand in the next little while so we are hoping to meet up with them - maybe we can actually DO something with them rather than hang around and wait for John to get well!
No comments:
Post a Comment