Lake Tekapo

Hello pretty! We didn’t really see much of Lake Tekapo the first day we were there (see Christchurch post), but got to check it out the next day- it’s really very pretty. It’s glacier-fed, so it has this sediment floating in it that makes it almost opaque and absolutely ice-blue. Pretty awesome. We pretty much just walked around it here and there and took some pictures- the town itself is pretty sleepy.

The big attraction in the town though is the star gazing. There’s an observatory on the top of a nearby mountain that offers tours and the whole town helps out with the star gazing by using special light bulbs on everything to minimize light pollution. Add to that that the air is ultra-clean and the result is a pretty impressive sky. Unfortunately the night we were there it was pretty overcast, but what we saw was awesome. It was also cool taking a look at the view from the southern hemisphere: some things you can see in both hemispheres, like Orion (though he’s upside down!), while others are southern-viewing only, like the Southern Cross, Gemini and Scorpio. And no dippers down here! It was also cool hearing about the different stories for the shared constellations- we’re so used to the greek names and stories it’s easy to forget that other cultures were looking at the same things and creating their own explanations.

(image lifted from the star gazing website- my camera is not sophisticated enough to capture this. plus it was cloudy. But that's what it looks like normally!)

We had originally scheduled three nights here for more hiking and such, but decided to move on when a) we saw how sleepy the town was, and b) evacuees started pouring in from Christchurch and the town ran out of hotel rooms. It was sad to see folks with their cars packed full of what they could take and not be able to find a place to sleep that night. I talked with JR about offering the floor of our hotel room to folks and he was down, but it seemed that everyone had already moved on by the time the star gazing tour was done. The other kind of haunting thing was watching the train of emergency vehicles heading towards Christchurch while everyone else was leaving. It was really a sad image.