After a great trip to Milford Sound, we woke up early, checked out of our hostel, and began the road trip up to Mount Cook. Mount Cook is a very popular mountain located in the Aoraki National Park, which is a few hours east of Christchurch. The weather seemed great on the way up, but as we approached the trail-head of our day hike, the fog came in, and the clouds pretty much obstructed everything.
Nevertheless, we came here for a hike, and that was what we were going to do. Once we got to the lake lookout point in Hooker Valley, we saw huge chunks of broken off glacier floating in the water. Unfortunately, we couldn’t see any mountains because of the clouds, but the lake was a baby blue color that seemed to stand out in the relatively white weather. Just as we began to head back to the trail-head, rain started to come down very hard, very fast. We had about an hour walk back, and the rain began alternating with small bits of hail. We got absolutely drenched. Honestly, we weren’t even angry because this was the type of weather that we were expecting throughout the entire trip. We had just been getting really lucky lately. We had a wet drive back down to Lake Hawea, a town close to Wanaka, where our Air BnB was located.
Our hosts were Jennifer and her family (her husband, daughter, cat, and dog). They were very kind and welcoming, always allowing us to come inside and hang out in the house when our actual sleeping area was in a heated trailer (which was a lot more comfortable that it sounds). She recommended a bunch of hikes and restaurants in the area, which both turned out to be pretty great. We ate an early dinner at a quiet restaurant right on Lake Hawea, which was beautiful of course, and the warm seafood chowder was exactly what we needed after the cold, wet tramp we did earlier in the day.
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