Wandergliding: Mount Cook's Good Looks

December 9^th, 2019

After my scenic flight my plan was to relocate from the Freedom Camping spot at Lake Pukaki to a campsite at Mount Cook. I decided to take a gravel road for part of the trip from Lake Tekapo which had rave reviews on CamperMate, and it didn’t disappoint. I only saw 2 other vehicles on my way back towards Pukaki and the views were phenomenal. Purple and pink lupins lined the road in some sections providing a lovely melange of colours (am I allowed to get that artistic?!?). I was listening to a podcast which was about Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey film which kinda fit the bill as it is quite an artistic and colourful film but I kept having to interrupt it as I would have to pull over, disconnect my phone from Betty’s stereo and snap a few pics or take a video and then plug it back in and start the podcast again.

The lovely lupins:

I reached the lake and decided to head west along the lakeside knowing that I’d be backtracking to the campsite where I stayed the night before and then driving up the other side of the lake to reach the Mt. Cook campsite. Who cares…I have time and perhaps I’ll never be here again… The views were gobsmacking. I continued until I could go no further, snapped more pics and then began the long circumnavigation around the lake. If the road had only continued around the head of the lake I probably only had 20 kilometres to reach the campground but since it did not cross the 2 kilometer wide Godley River that I had flown over early in the day (read the last post if you don’t know what I’m talking about), I instead had an hour and a half drive to get there.

No worries though as it was a lovely drive with gorgeous views everywhere. It’s amazing in a place like this that your bar or threshold of what is picture worthy gets higher and higher and you start looking at an amazing vista and thinking “Ah…I’ve seen better, keep going…”.

Hard to tell from this pic, but I'm looking at a small island in front of Mount Cook that I flew over in the Air Safari.

Near the west end of the lake the gravel road turned back into a paved one and my pace picked up. I passed the campsite I stayed at the night before and started back up the other side of the lake. The closer I got to Mt. Cook, the better it looked and even though I’d snapped tons of photos of it earlier, I found myself pulling over here and there for yet another capture of this beauty.

On the other side of the lake:

At one stop I decided I should try to do a selfie, but not by holding the phone in my hand as that often washed out the background. Instead I opened one of the side windows of Betty 2.0 and lodged the phone in the windowpane. I set the time for 10 seconds, angled the phone correctly, hit the shutter button and ran outside and posed for the pic. It took a couple of tries but it finally worked to my satisfaction.

I didn't quite get in the picture for this selfie...but I thought it turned out alright!

Now I got it!

I walked back to Betty, grabbed the phone from the window on the left side of the van, pulled the window shut from the outside and hopped in the driver’s seat, started her up and got back on the road. I had my window open for most of the trip but for some reason it seemed windier now. I could hear some things rustling around in the back of the van but didn’t think much of it. I had bought some postcards the day before along with a package of 5 stamps which were the denominations of each bill in New Zealand. Stamps for postcards aren’t cheap as they are $2-3 each. When I was doing the selfie I saw that the postcards and stamp package had fallen onto the floor in the back but I didn’t bother picking them up.

Anyways, I continued a few kilometres down the road then looked back and realized that I hadn’t shut the side door of the van! I slowed down and just that motion caused the door to slam shut. I wondered what might have flown out the open door but decided to press on as it was getting late in the afternoon and I wanted to make sure I found a campsite at Mt. Cook and I didn’t see anywhere to turn around for quite some time. Later I would find out that all but one or two of the postcards stayed in the van although they were strewn about…but the $16 worth of stamps flew out! Oh well, could have been worse.

When I arrived at the campsite, with Mount Cook looming over it. Wow, it was amazing! I thought that the campsite was full and that I might have to drive the 30-40 minutes back to Lake Pukaki as there were some orange pylons blocking the entrance so I pulled into the day parking area, which was pretty packed, and lucked out finding a spot. I walked over to a couple of official looking people with their high visibility vests and asked about the camping and it turned out that there had just been some washouts from recent rain that they were filling in and there were numerous vacant sites still. There was another way to drive into the camping area. Sweet.

I pulled in, paid my fees and sat down at amazement of the view I had.

Betty 2.0 and Mount Cook.