It’s basically what everyone’s said about New Zealand since 2001, but you know when you watched Lord of the Rings, and the landscapes seemed so beautiful that it was difficult to believe they were real? Aoraki was that fantasy world- so magnificent and raw that it felt like you’d fallen through the pages of an epic.
We left early for the one hour drive from Twizel to Mount Cook village, catching first sight of the highest mountain in New Zealand shortly after dawn as the sky turned pink and lavender. Drunk on Pinterest photos of the valley, I felt like a pot boiling over with excitement as we set off on the Hooker Valley track- but this was pretty immediately checked as we rounded a corner and saw the heavy dark clouds hanging over the top of the peaks. Our experience clearly wasn’t going to look like those pictures- but I really need to remember that just because something doesn’t look like you imagined, it doesn’t mean you’re somehow going to have a ‘lesser’ experience. With the clouds obscuring the summits, the glaciers strewn across the mountains seemingly tumbled out of the sky itself, and the fine misty showers would intermittently rupture into rainbows with their ends at the bottom of the scree slopes.
After two hours of hiking we reached the Hooker glacier, all distant, black and moody and on a scale that was difficult to wrap one’s head around. A couple of icebergs had broken off and been blown right to the other side of the lake, giving pretty surreal views from the pebbly beach. At this point the wind started picking up, soon developing into gusts that could knock you off your feet. We pretty much crawled across back across the three suspension bridges to get back to the start of the track, clinging on for dear life- nothing like a bit of adrenaline to finish off a hike, eh? It was the sort of place that I imagine you could spend years exploring and still feel like you were discovering something completely new. Now more than ever, it feels surreal that we got the opportunity to see it.
Last post from our trip to NZ coming up soon! x
