The journey starts ...

Yesterday Anna and I were walking in the mountains. Today I've been feeling ill at work. After all the great food that we ate in New Zealand I came home and made myself ill with a very disgusting, burnt (but still not properly cooked) pizza.

Our adventure really started by driving round-and-round a roundabout in Christchurch with me complaining that Anna really should not have lost my GOOGLE maps printout. Our car was fun ... I'm going to record here (before I forget) that a Ford Focus really is a good car. Okay, I already hear David and others laughing, but it did get us across the Southern Alps twice without falling off a cliff! After finding the correct route we immediately stopped to celebrate in a pub. Which was basically closed. They did have one toasted sandwich left and one pie. They tasted wonderful after the aeroplane food! We also made our first discovery about New Zealand ... you buy "handles" of beer. They also have funny accents.

The South Island is dramatic. The Eastern side (which includes Christchurch) is mainly dry and non-forested. We saw lots of fields and lots of sheep. To our right-hand side we saw the huge mountain range (the Southern Alps) getting closer and closer. We drove down to Ashburton, Geraldine (stopping to buy chocolate in the chocolate shop), Fairlie and stopped for the night at Lake Tekapo. We checked-in at the great hotel that Anna had found and then immediately went out again to try ice-skating. Anna saw snow and ice! She was happy! She also found a log-fire and a big pine-cone. We were now truly in the mountains and the final part of the drive had many "wow" moments. Damn it ... I need to find my thesaurus otherwise I'm going to say "stunning", "amazing" and "wow" much too often!

The ice skating was ... errr ... ummm ... stunning! At the beginning we had the entire outdoor rink to ourselves and managed (most of the time) to stay upright! Anna even learnt how to stop. I used the walls. We had an almost full moon above and could clearly make out the Southern stars! Finally a couple arrived who started playing ice hockey at one end and then about another 5 people turned up who were worse than us at skating. Feeling that the rink was getting rather crowded (!) we headed off into the town for dinner. Anna found a log fire (this sentence also may reoccur quite often on this blog). We found some beers. We were the only people in the restaurant (it was the only restaurant in the town).

In the morning we awoke to a clear day and ambled down to the lake side to watch the sun rise. Lake Tekapo is incredible (my book describes it as a place of "exceptional beauty and clarity. The remarkable blue of the lake is caused by rock flour - finally ground particles of rock brought down by the glaciers at the head of the lake").

We then drove to Lake Pukaki. I'll stop here with a panorama of that amazing lake!