The trip - Where are we and what the hell we’re doing there? Lake Tekapo & Aoraki/Mt Cook

On the way down south we decided to have a visit at New Zealand highest mountain the Aoraki/Mt Cook. On the way to the Southern Alps we’d to pass Lake Tekapo, we’re thought it’s worth staying there for one or two days, so did we. Lake Tekapo a quit big lake with really wonderful turkis water surrounded by the McKenzies mountains (the next before the Alps). The village consists just of some shops and accommodations along the main road. Because these accommodations seemed to be to expensive for us, we stayed at the near lake McGregor on a DOC campground. These campgrounds are awesome! There owned and operated by the government and mostly do have an “honesty box” for the payment (and the fees are very cheap $6 p.p.). That’s something, I guess, would not work in good old Germany, anyway.After our first night we did a tramp around MtJohn and along the lakeshore. That has been a very nice 3,5 hours walk with nice lookouts. After the walk our feet were hurting a little bit, so we went to the Hot Springs at the sea and that was just the perfect ending for the day! The have a temperature between 36 to 40 degrees and that day the air temperature was around 20 degrees so it was an extremely relaxing chillout!!!On the way to Mt Cook we stoped at the Mt Cook salmon farm to buy so fresh fish, yummy. At Mt Cook we did the next tramp down to the Hooker Valley Lake. That’s a glacier lake, so there had been ice-bergs swimming in it! The first time for me, to be free-willingly in the mountains in the summer for walking and so the first time I really enjoyed that! But beside the beautiful countryside there’s nothing more than the big hotel at Mt Cook. This hotel controls the most things over there, beside the DOC campground we stayed.

Chilled and cold greeting to Germany (we’ve seen snow as well! ;-)