Days 40–41: Lake Tekapo
Stargazing and hiking next to this stunning lake
Forty days and counting! Our travel time feels like it’s flying by, but it isn’t over just yet. From Dunedin, we moved on up through the South Island to Lake Tekapo, famous for its amazingly blue lake and its International Dark Sky Reserve.
Before we move onto those though, it’s also famous for this statue of a collie…
And also, this church…
After visiting these two must-sees, we booked our stargazing tour for that evening — starting at 10:55! — before cracking on with the rest of the day.
We spent the majority of the day walking the lakeshore track to the top of Mount John. There was a shorter route up, but we weren’t in a rush and we figured the views of the lake would be pretty great. We weren’t wrong.
It turned out to be a tough hike in the hot sun, and there were times when we had to run through sections of long grass to avoid swarms of flies, but we powered on through and took our time relaxing at the summit.
We stopped off in the cafe at the top and bought some exorbitantly priced drinks while we enjoyed the scenery.
Once we were feeling up to it again, we took the shorter route back down the mountain.
At the bottom of the mountain, we treated ourselves to a long old soak in the hot pools at Tekapo Springs Resort. They were very welcome after a long day walking in the sun.
I did mean to take some photos while we were there, but I completely forgot, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that we did actually go.
Once our skin was as wrinkly as it was going to get, we got showered and settled in for the evening next to the lake. We didn’t head to the campsite straightaway because we still had the stargazing tour to go.
It’s fair to say that we were feeling pretty sleepy when the time came to go on the tour, but we managed to wake ourselves up and go along anyway.
Luck was on our side because — as you can tell from the photos above — it was a very clear day which carried over into the night. So not only were we bang in the middle of a dark sky reserve, but we also had 100% visibility for the tour.
We weren’t as lucky when it came to booking a tour though because — as usual — we left it until the last minute and due to the very good conditions, most tours were fully booked. We did manage to squeeze onto one that wouldn’t have been our first choice, but we only have ourselves to blame for that.
The tour lasted for 75 minutes and involved our tour guides pointing out many of the main constellations in the night sky as well as the chance to see a few different cosmic phenomena through telescopes. The guides used lasers to point out different stars and constellations in the sky. Just this on its own was amazing as it genuinely looked like the laser was pointing directly at the stars; you could just see the whole beam leading up to the point where it appeared to end at the star. In reality, that light will take years to reach even the closest stars and billions of years to reach the furthest ones, at which point, we’ll be long dead and intelligent life that may see that light in billions of years may wonder what it could mean. Weird!
Probably the coolest thing we saw was a cluster of around one million stars through one of the telescopes. They are so far away that we couldn’t see them with the naked eye, but through the telescope, they did look pretty incredible. Given that in ideal conditions, the average human can only see around two thousand stars with the naked eye, seeing one million all clustered together was quite something.
All in all, it was a very cool evening, however, the tour was very busy, especially considering there were only two telescopes for the twenty-odd people there. Also, a lot of time was spent pointing out constellations — which I feel anyone could do using an app on their phone — instead of seeing more things through the telescopes which people rarely get the opportunity to do. We’re glad we went because it’s not every day that you get to experience a clear night in a dark sky reserve, but maybe we’ll book a tour in advance next time.
Now, you’d think that the end of the stargazing tour would mark the end of our day once we drove to the campsite. You’d be wrong. Throughout all of our travels in New Zealand, we’ve almost always arrived at our campsites before dark, just because it’s nice to cook dinner when you can still see and they usually fill up if you don’t get there early.
As Sod’s Law would have it, the one time we were driving back at gone one in the morning was the one time that the campsite was out in the sticks with very confusing instructions on how to reach it.
Long story short, we were concentrating too much on avoiding suicidal rabbits that we missed the sign for our turn off — we didn’t know this at the time though and only found out the following day. This led to us driving along some very, very bad gravel roads alongside a river where we managed to get the van stuck. After about fifteen minutes of effort, we managed to free the van again, but we were still no closer to finding the elusive campsite.
Eventually, we saw another van parked up for the night and we decided that we would do the same and postpone getting back out again until the morning. We were very tired at this point. It also felt a little like something out of a horror film: two travellers, lost in a pitch-black dark sky reserve, no vision beyond what they can see in their headlights, van stuck, no idea where they are, etc… It just seemed easiest to lock the doors and get some sleep.
Morning came and we finally got to properly see where we’d managed to get ourselves.
We were able to spot the main bulk of vans — that were camped at the actual campsite — a few hundred metres away.
Here’s the view from the main road of the gravel roads down by the river that we were driving on…
Keen to relax a little bit after our hot hike the day before and the late night van shenanigans — not that kind! — we decided to start the day off by going back to a quiet spot next to the lake and just chilling out for a bit.
From there, we paid eight bucks — eight bucks?! — to use the private road to drive back to the top of Mount John so that I could get some footage from the top on my GoPro — I had forgotten to take it with me the day before. Eejit.
Eventually, we left Lake Tekapo altogether to find a campsite partway between there and our next destination of Mount Cook.
We stayed the night at a great little spot next to the canal with some excellent views.
I played the role of dutiful boyfriend by taking photos while Anna made dinner…
