Mt Cook

Hi guys! I'm staying in the nicest place in Mt. Cook National park. We get en-suites and a bath!!!!! Today was just a drive from Dunedin to Mt. Cook, NZ's highest mountain. I've seen it before from the west side but we're driving up the east now. Again stunning views, the mountains here are beautiful. The village is just holiday chalets and hotels and a cafe. The weather turned pretty bad, there is a 2 hour walk we could do which we could have done and our driver was going to take us to the start , cutting the time by 20 mins, but it started to snow a bit. He said we could still do it but he wasn't going to take us, he didn't want to be responsible if the weather turned bad. So we didn't do that and I didn't to the boat trip through the glacier lake with the iceburgs as I don't have a spare $128. We went to the Sir Edmund Hilary museum (first person to climb everest and a kiwi) and watched a really cool 3d movie filmed on and around Mt Cook. It told the Maori legend of how Mt cook or Aoraki came to be. Earth Mother and Sky Father were locked in a tight embrace when there son Tane Mahuta (a giant kauri tree north of Auckland 1,400 years old which there are pictures of me hugging on facebook) grew tall and forced them apart. There three other sons decided to visit earth mother and set out in their canoe to sail to earth. The canoe hit a reef, turned over and they climbed on top, hoping to turn it back over but a cold gust of wind blew and froze them, turning them to stone. The tallest some, Aoraki or cloud piercer became mt cook and the other sons are other mountains in the Souther Alps with the canoe being the smaller part of the range.

The 3D movie showed all this in a cartoon then went on to film show shot of mt cook from above, below, inside the glacier, skiiers, sunset, sunrise ect. That was good as the weathers pretty bad so we an hardly see it even though we are at the base. We had a great meal in the bar here, lamb and venison burger with tamarillo chutney, awesome! Off to Rangitata tomorrow, its where we go now instead of Christchurch. Not sure what there is to do there.