Giveaways
IN NEW ZEALAND, it is easy for solo women travellers to get into the wilderness, whether you are an adventurer, hiker, mountaineer or photographer, or just an ordinary person.
You can find cheap places to stay everywhere, using campsite phone apps.
Whether you choose to buy a car or rent a car there are so many ways of travelling New Zealand, on good roads.
Here is my latest story.
I parked my car at Christchurch airport, where they charged $7 a day, while I was in Auckland on business.
When I arrived back at Christchurch I got picked up from the plane by the carpark operators and taken to the carpark, all part of the service.
I drove south to Queenstown with a friend named Dianna, through the picturesque towns of Fairlie and Tekapo.
Here’s a link to a really excellent Youtube video of Tekapo, showing the picturesque Church of the Good Shepherd, which looks very old but was actually built in the 1930s.
‘Lake Tekapo — New Zealand’ by Mark Gee, ‘The Art of Night’ (2016)
We detoured west along the shore of Lake Pukaki and stayed in a backpackers hosttel at Mount Cook village or, as it is now called, Aoraki Mount Cook village, below Aoraki/Mt Cook, which at 3,724 metres high or 12,218 feet is the highest mountain in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
The name Aoraki comes from the legends of the South Island Māori, in which Aoraki was the leader of a band of four heavenly heroes who came down from the sky to explore the lower earth by canoe. Unfortunately, when their journey was done, the canoe failed to ascend to the heavens and tipped over instead. Aoraki and his companions stood on the upturned vessel and were turned to stone along with the canoe itself. The canoe became the whole of the South Island and Aoraki became the mountain Aoraki (Mount Cook), with his three companions alongside as lesser peaks. As for the name Mount Cook, this honours the eighteenth-century navigator and explorer Captain Cook. It's ironic that both names for the mountain commemorate voyagers!
There are lots of spectacular walks you can do in the Aoraki/Mount Cook area, which is in a national park of the same name. Things such as the Hooker Glacier Walk and walks along the Tasman Valley. Here’s a Youtube video that Dianna and I made at Aoraki/Mount Cook; Dianna lives in the North Island, where it’s a bit warmer . . .
Me and my old school friend Dianna enjoying the snow at Aoraki/Mount Cook
Variable weather made for a more interesting holiday, and more interesting photos, than if the weather had been totally fine!
Here are some of the photos:
Update: While the route at the beginning of this post goes directly past lakes Tekapo and Pukaki, it also passes close to some other lakes and their lakeshore communities.
These include the lakes of the Waitaki Valley, which I have written about in a later post, and also Lakes Ōhau, Hāwea and Wānaka on the westward side of the route. I have written about the latter two, here.
As for Lake Ōhau, here is a photo of what it looks like, which I took at the end of September 2021.
Sadly, the village beside Lake Ōhau was consumed by a wildfire in 2020. Was it, too, a casualty of global warming?
In addition to adding this last section, I have also renewed some of the text above it. If you appreciated this post, you may wish to have a look at my new, 2021, book about the South Island. It’s available for purchase from my website, a-maverick.com. You might also be interested in its companion volume about the North Island, The Neglected North Island: New Zealand’s Other Half.
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