The night sky was just amazing last night, you could clearly see Orions belt and the Milky Way plus a load of others that I don’t know the names of.

Another goods night sleep and up at 7.15 for our days activities.

Our final tramp was the Hooker Valley Track, a 10km easy walk to Lake Hooker.  We set off from the campsite at 8.00 the sun not fully up and there was a lot of cloud cover. The route was alongside the glacial river and we had to cross 3 swing bridges. Through the gaps in the cloud we could glimpse the snow covered mountains. There were lots of photo stops and after 1 hour 45 minutes we reached Lake Hooker where there were actual icebergs floating in the lake. We could also clearly see Mount Cook (Aoraki – the translation being the title of today’s blog). At that moment the sun came over the mountain and wow it was stunning. Less photos on the way back, the sun was now fully out and we were back at the campsite at 11.00.

We drove Mabel down to Mount Cook Village to the public shelter where we were finally able to have a shower. (We had planned to actually have showers in Mabel last night but she ran out of water – oops!) So that was the best £2 we spent for a whole 6 minute hot shower.

We had planned to have a lovely lunch out but it so happens every restaurant and cafe there was were closed either on a Monday or Tuesday, or at lunchtime. So we hastily made some sarnies from our dwindling supplies and made our way up to The Hermitage Hotel.

We arrived bang on time for our check in with Glacier Explorers. 16 of us boarded a coach for our drive round to Lake Tasman. You can’t actually get that near to it by road so we then had a 25 minute walk to the lake itself where 2 boats were ready to take us over the lake to the Tasman Glacier. Our guide piloted us over the lake giving us some glacial facts and figures along the way. The top of the glacier was rather dirty due to all the rock debris but the front of it where it meets the lake was a mixture of white and blues and is 30 meters high. A fantastic experience.

Back at the Hermitage Hotel we walked back to Mabel said goodbye to the Mount Cook national park and started our drive in the direction of Christchurch. 

We had a quick pitstop at Lake Tekapo, filled Mabel up with fuel, had a quick bowl of soup to keep us going and then we found a dumping station where we could empty Mabels grey water and refill her with fresh.

Onwards to our campsite at Peel Forest, we stopped at Jack’s Chinese in a little place called Geraldine to grab a takeaway before getting to the campsite.

Well a Chinese takeaway in NZ is a bit different to that in the UK. So much more veg in it, celery, courgette, cauliflower and all the normal carrot, broccoli and mushrooms all washed down with the remainder of our leftover bottle of wine and last cans of beer. 

Distance covered 228 km (141 miles).