Sabbatical 2014: Last South Island Holiday, 26-28 July

Dick and I decided to give each other a birthday present of one last trip to the South Island. He never got to Lake Tekapo, and when I was there with Mom and Bren, the "dark sky" was lit with a full moon. Beautiful, but not brilliant with the stars of the dark sky the area is known for. I found a weekend with a new moon and we decided to spend a couple nights there. We arrived on Saturday and were told the tour would be an "inside the astronomy lab" one because the sky had clouded up. We decided to place our bets on Sunday.

Entering Christchurch, from Jetstar

Tekapo sunset

Dick, first view of Lake Tekapo

Southern Alps, en route to Tekapo

A deer farm

Sunday morning, I got out before the sun to try to get some good photos with my new used camera at the Church of the Good Shepherd, probably the most photographed place at Lake Tekapo. I had hoped that it would be relatively free of tourists at that point. It just happened that there was a whole class of photographers there on a winter course! I had fun talking with them, but it was challenging to find a spot to take of the lake without getting at least 10 photographers and their tripods in the picture.

Church of the Good Shepherd at dawn

Sunrise over Lake Tekapo

Reflection in the church window

As I decided to return to our hotel, I could not find the car keys. (Here comes a "stupid Jody!" story). I checked my coat pockets. No keys. I went back and recovered my steps. No keys. Checked the pockets again. Looked around the car. Damn! no keys.

I walked to the nearest gas station. The woman at the convenience store gave me the card of an auto repair guy. I called and he said he could be out in 10 minutes. I tried to call Dick to let him know what was going on, but got one of the numbers wrong (the major problem with auto dial is that I don't memorise the numbers). So, I walked back down, waited around the car for a while, went and took more photos, and waited.

The man arrived and got into my car for me in no time. The cost was $50; I only had $40 cash, but he said that was ok (typical Kiwi). We opened the boot. No keys. I dumped the contents of my purse in the boot and dug through the camera case. No keys. Looked in the car. Same.

Now I was really concerned. The auto guy kindly suggested he would help me scrounge the area around the church to find them. We did that for about 10 minutes. Then he suggested that we think of it in a grid and do a more methodical search. At this point, I was thinking that I would cause us to waste an entire day as I was going to have to figure out how to get a key made for this car on a Sunday.

Then I got smart. I thought, Jody ALWAYS does something REALLY STUPID. What stupid thing am I overlooking? That was exactly what I needed to think! I had the keys all along. They were in my jeans pocket. I never put things in my jeans pockets. But this time I did.

So, I lost $40 and about an hour or so of time. But, at least we had not lost the entire day. And good thing it was, because this was a gorgeous day, and we planned to go to Tekapo Springs, for which we bought day passes and I made an appointment for a massage and facial.

Tekapo Monument for Shepherd Dogs

Lake Tekapo in daylight

We started at the snow tubing area - a short, but steep, icy track you fly down on a sort of inner tube, ending by going up two or three ice banks that help you slow down when you reach the end. We started once with the slower tube with fabric on the bottom, but once was enough for me, and I convinced Dick that we needed the faster model. So, we went down in the fast tube, first on our butts, then on our stomachs, and then hanging on to each other's tube (the combined weight made it really fast!).

After about 45 minutes of that, we traded in the tubes and our warm coats for our swim suits and a 38 C hot pool where we enjoyed the beautiful views of Lake Tekapo while we heated up our muscles. I finished off with a wonderful deep tissue back massage and facial.

After a break in our hotel room at Peppers Bluewater Resort, we tried dinner at their restaurant. It was excellent, with delicious steak (me) and salmon (Dick) and fresh veggies. Then we struck off for the Earth and Sky night tour of a dark sky reserve at Mount John observatory. We struck gold with a beautiful clear sky with no moon. The Milky Way was a thick white streak across the night sky, and we could see planets and nebulae with the naked eye. All the stats about their size and their distances were hard to comprehend - thousands of light years away, billions of years old. To see these images whose light was reaching us from their appearance hundreds of years ago, to be told that astronomers thought that what we were seeing in some places had already blown up into a super nova, but that would not be seen for hundreds of years -- well, it made me feel so very small. The song "Dust in the Wind" came to mind. How tiny, how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things. And yet, I still believe what we do is somehow important. Not because there is some god watching what we do. But simply because we ARE, and some of us are so much more comfortable than most. And that is enough.

The Milky Way, widest part

Milky Way - Southern Cross in bottom centre

Magellan Nebulae

Dick had the great idea of going back to the summit in the morning for breakfast and to see where we were before heading back to Christchurch for our afternoon flight. What a great idea that was. By daylight, the place was equally stunning with snow-capped Southern Alps surrounding us.