Tekapo, Pukaki, Aoraki/Mt. Cook & Twizel

My previous post stood alone to tell the story of visiting Edoras, but the rest of the day was fun too. We had been covering a lot of territory, spending hours on the bus. Red Carpet Tours filled the time with quizzes on Tolkien trivia, which made things more enjoyable. This post is just going to be sights during our travels.

As we traveled down the Kaikoura coast the day before, we did a quiz to identify who the best Tolkien trivia people were. Today, we were in teams. Everyone submitted questions to the team captains and then we hoped to stump the other team. The questions and the answers were good! I am delighted that a couple of my answers were actually helpful for the team. It was close, and in the end, Vidush’s team won, and we got a little fake Oscar as the prize.

After visiting Edoras, we passed two beautiful lakes on our way to the small town of Twizel, where we would stay the night. These are Lake Tekapo and Lake Pukaki.

The highway crosses Tekapo River as it empties into the lake, and there is a scenic pedestrian bridge across the river that we could see from the bus as we passed.

As we were coming to expect of New Zealand, we drove through beautiful countryside between the two lakes.

Lake Pukaki is larger than Lake Tekapo, and it caught everyone’s attention. Then we spotted the mountain.

We were all so glad that Josh made the decision to stop on the shore. We were close to our hotel in Twizel, he said, but the view was outstanding, and he knew we had been pining for mountain views all day at Edoras.

At 12,218 feet (3,724 meters) this is New Zealand’s highest peak. Back home, my favourite volcano, Mt. Hood, is 11,249 feet, and Mt. Rainier outside of Seattle is 14,410 feet (4,392 meters).

Josh explained that New Zealand has officially changed the name to include the Maori name. It’s European name was, of course, to honor Capt. James Cook, who never actually saw the peak. This name was given in 1851, though Native people were already living there at that time and had already named the mountain e Waka o Aoraki (‘Aoraki’s Canoe’). Names of multiple landmarks were amended to incorporate their Maori names as a result of the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Act of 1998.

Many of the lakes and water ways in the region are this colour due to the glacial flour (fine silt particles from the nearby glaciers). At the right angle, sunlight reflects off the particles transforming it to a brilliant blue.

We climbed back onto the bus, and a few minutes later, we reached the town of Twizel, and checked into our hotel rooms. The town is too small to have reliable restaurants for a whole tour bus, so instead Red Carpet Tours provided a buffet dinner for the whole tour group. There were other tour groups there at the same time, so the buffet room was packed. The food was good and the conversation was better.

Josh told us that because of the remote location, star gazing was something we should try, if there were enough breaks in the clouds to see stars. Pedro and I intended to stay up late and try. In the hotel lobby we saw this display case:

The information sheets inside the case gave some interesting information about the Twizel location:

“Twizel is actually the largest town in the region with many of the services the film crew would require, such as a number of commercial kitchens to assist with food preparation for the hundred of film crew. Additionally, Twizel is home to many other required resources such as mechanics, engineers, and lots of local people available for hire as workers and extras (Orcs) on the film site. There was a final deciding factor: Twizel’s accessibility: location on State Highway 8, the only transport link between Queenstown and Christchurch. Highway 8 is the only authorized route for the transport of oversize machinery that would be required to travel to the largest of the Lord of the Rings film sites: the set of the Pelennor Fields!”

We would see Pelennor Fields the next day, so – with our anticipation piqued – we returned to our room to wait for the stars to come out. But remember it was summer, and the sun was up for 15 hours, and the dusky sky lingered for even longer. And I was still exhausted from coughing every day and night. I stayed awake till 10:30 pm and it was still light out, so I gave up and went to try to sleep in between coughing fits.

Pedro stayed up late and walked outside into the night to see the stars. He tried to take a photo of the sky with my camera, but the camera is great at capturing and using light not even discernible to the human eye. So he switched to his phone.

In the morning, he explained to me that he stayed up till nearly midnight, and still there was too much light in the sky to get a good view of a starry sky. Others in our tour group stayed up till midnight as well, and the ones who managed to get a great starry sky view were those who left the hotel grounds and walked into the nearby golf course. But during all those late-night excursions, I was fast asleep.