Turns out that my new German friends, Nina and Mahoni, were moving along to Tekapo. So I waited a while around the lodge and jumped in the car with them once they were ready to leave. Tekapo isn’t all that far from Mount Cook. Maybe an hour and a half car ride.
We had to drive around Lake Pukaki and we ended up stopping along the way to take in the scenery. The lake was this crystal blue. It was irresistible. So we decided to jump in and have a swim. The water was fairly cold but the sun was out and that kept us in the water for a while.
Their plan was to visit the hot pools in Tekapo and I decided to join them. It wasn’t originally in my plans to visit but I was having a good time with them so I decided to join. We jumped in the sauna and they helped me understand the right way to use it. There’s a certain way you should increase and then decrease your body temperature so you don’t do harm to yourself.
The view from the pools was also quite beautiful. There doesn’t seem to be a bad view in all of the south island. We just hung out in the spa for most of the day until it was time for them to close at 9 o’clock.
Lake Tekapo is very famous for its stargazing. And we decided to take advantage. The town is so small and this area of the country doesn’t have any major cities so there is very little light pollution. After checking into the hostel I jumped back into the car and we headed out of town so we could get away from all the lights that remained in town.
We drove towards the observatory, which was closed oddly enough. We parked the car outside the gates and hiked up the hill and found a nice place to lie down. The forecast predicted rain but we got lucky and the clouds stayed away from the area. At one point it seemed like the clouds were everywhere around us except where we actually were.
The stars were absolutely amazing, even better than when I was on the Kepler Track a week or so earlier. At one point the clouds covered up the moon and we were in total darkness. We were mesmerized by the number of stars in the sky. The Milky Way was totally visible and it was just awesome. I’ve only seen the stars like that once before, two years earlier in Peru when I hiked Colca Canyon.
We stayed for a while and spoke about all types of things. Whether we believed aliens existed. If human beings had a soul. Politics and the future of our earth. It was just very pure and open. It felt good to communicate with other people in that way.