Lake Tekapo, Lake Pukaki and Mount Cook National Park have something theatrical about them. It's like a scenario that you contemplate without really knowing what to do.. You look at the same, nothing moves, and you can't stop looking at it. I don't know how to describe it without falling into the epithet, so I typed into the computer history Lake Tekapo. The AI ??told me this: “Lake Tekapo, whose traditional Maori name is Takap?, means 'to rush out at night`. According to local legend, two bosses rushed to flee at night, but they were surprised by the dawn and became the pillars that now mark the entrance to the Lindis Pass. Geologically, It is a glacial lake fed by glaciers, whose distinctive turquoise color is due to 'rock flour' (ground rock sediments) suspended in water.
The AI ??revealed to me that rock flour exists. And wore turquoise. Sometimes I think if in the next world we will need, and then I remember those waters and I think that Artificial Intelligence may be able to describe them, but can't enjoy them. And without being able to enjoy them or hate them or... their chronicles will be the result of an algorithm, mathematics, and trips are letters.
We were driving restlessly in the car.. We stayed at the Alps Motel in the nearby town of Twist. It was a small town devoid of tourists in which the restaurants closed at 21 hours, summer, when it was not yet dark. And we, unable to sleep in the clear, We went to the shores of the lakes and let the night fall on us to contemplate the throat of the Milky Way.
Tekapo was the most famous lake, because that's where the biggest town is, and a chapel and a statue of a dog. "In 1855, Scottish settler James McKenzie was captured 'in the company of a thousand stolen sheep' while herding them with his dog through a remote alpine pass towards 'an immense plain'. His exploits were written in legend, and his name, although with a modified spelling, has been applied to these highlands ever since. Your faithful sheepdog, ‘Friday’, is immortalized in a monument on the shores of the lake”, count the page discovertekapo.
The height was nice, the chapel an ode to the pioneers who traveled with their gods anywhere to feel protected from death but not from life, but I liked Lake Pukaki better. Less people went there, and simply, on some mound that served as a platform, We parked some caravans and cars and we stayed silent, letting our eyes talk..
One day we went to Monte Cook. With thunder and black clouds it could be Mordor, of that Lord of the Rings that they recorded there, but with the indigo sky and white clouds that we had it was a floating garden. The highest mountain in the country, 3764 meters, pays tribute to a man who never saw her, Captain James Cook, and like everything else in this land, it has a Maori legend that assures that that is Aroaki, the tallest of the three sons of the God of Heaven, that when he came down to land in his canoe he stayed there frozen.
We decided to take one of the various trails offered around the mountain.. We passed by cobbled flows of green waters. We cross a suspension bridge. It was a marked route of just over 15 km, round trip, that reached a viewpoint next to a lagoon where we saw pieces of ice floating. Everything was spectacular. And there we were, and thousands like us, turning nature into a walk through any big city on a Sunday.
A New Zealand saying goes that “if you must bow your head, let it be towards the high mountains, Aoraki”. The first woman to reach the top, Freda Du Faur, in 1910, he wrote in his memoir “you feel very small, very alone and really wanting to cry”. That peak has taken the lives of some of those who have tried to climb it.. For European mountaineers it was always a rarity, some Alps to tame nestled at the end of the world.
I'm not a mountain man, I like deserts and water, but I deeply admire those who climb to the tops. They listen to streams; they dismember ravines; they know how to get cold and cramps; they don't walk, They walk. we were walking.
That night we had a very bad dinner in a pub where they told us that the last table was reserved for eight. They closed in such a hurry that we finished eating dessert in front of the lake.. but the lake, the eternal moment of contemplating it, maybe it was five minutes or five nights, that trip was worth it. “Violet and Gold Night Parade”, written by the New Zealand writer Ngaio Marsh over those raw skies.
We left those mountains and lakes to finish our long trip through the two islands in the city of Christchurch. There is nothing better than having very low expectations to like a place. The city has a Victorian appearance in its center, with its well-kept gardens, its streets with bars, and a colored piano next to a stone arch. And it didn't take much more to enjoy it.. We returned a few days later to our house in Bangkok., where we lived then.
Would I go back to New Zealand? Not. Would I recommend traveling to New Zealand?? Clearly. It is beautiful. too beautiful, I already said it somewhereand the previous pieces, in my opinion. Maybe because I prefer beauty without order or rules.. But those are just tastes.
