All the Way to Someplace Else (and back again).: Going South for Our Free Weekend

Mackenzie country is dry but still pretty.
It is named after James Mackenzie who was a famous sheep thief.

This past weekend we had a long weekend with an extra day off so we went to Mt. Cook or Aoraki (its Maori name). On the way we stopped at Lake Tekapo (Lake Tech-a- poh) and Lake Pukaki (Lake Puh-kah-kee). At Lake Tekapo, there is a statue to James Mackenzie's dog Friday and all stock dogs. Friday was such a good sheep dog that Mackenzie would send him out on his own to steal flocks of sheep and bring them back to him. There is also a pretty, old stone church that looks out on the lake. The lake is so blue because the lake is fed by glacier water and the rock flour (which comes from the glacier rocks rubbing together) absorbs all of the other colors of the spectrum and reflects back the blue color only. It is so pretty. Lake Pukaki is in front of Mt. Cook and is also fed by glaciers.

Lake Tekapo is so pretty. Here I am in front of it.

My sister at Lake Tekapo

The lupines at Lake Tekapo are so pretty

My sister and I in front of the statue of Friday at Lake Tekapo

Mt. Cook or Aoraki from a distance with Lake Pukaki in front

The road in to Mt. Cook village

At Mt. Cook we went star gazing and 8 wheeling. Mt. Cook is a natural heritage site for darkness. There isn’t much light pollution so you can see many more stars then we can see at home in Delaware. When we went stargazing we saw the moon and Jupiter. We could also see three moons around Jupiter. We also saw the southern cross. The southern cross is a constellation that only appears in the southern hemisphere. It also appears on New Zealand’s flag. You have to be careful when you look for the cross because there are two others in the sky. You have to first find the two southern cross pointer stars to locate the southern cross. We also learned that the constellation Orion appears in our summer sky in Delaware but also appears upside down here in New Zealand in their summer sky (our winter time).

Me at our campground the morning after
stargazing. Mt Cook is in the background.

While star gazing we saw the jewel box which was a triangle of yellow stars with 2 blue stars surrounding an orange star. We learned that red stars are the oldest, yellow stars are the middle age and blue stars are the youngest. We also saw a nebula, a star nursery where stars are born which was a white cloud of gas with a bright star in the middle. We also saw three new stars off to one side.

We also looked at a star in Orion named Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice is a reddish star which means it is either old and burning out or has already burned out and we don’t know it yet. Beetlejuice is so far away that it takes 600 years for its light to reach the Earth. That means that the light that we see from Beetlejuice now was actually emitted by the star 600 years ago and is just reaching Earth now. We looked through special binoculars and a high tech telescope to see the stars and the planets. It was so dark we could even see satellites (3) overhead going by.

The Argo. It was windy.

The next morning we went 8 wheeling in a machine called an Argo. When we went eight wheeling, we went up the Tasman valley between the mountains a little ways and saw the Tasman glacier. Here they pronounce glacier (Glaze-cier). It was really bouncy because of all of the rocks we went over and we went fast! It was fun. I liked climbing up the hill of rocks on foot to look down at the glacier and the lake in front of it. It looks milky or chalky because of all of the rock flour in the water that hasn't settled out yet.