Our first stop was in Dunedin so that Mom and Sarah could go shopping and so we could get breakfast and food for the drive. Leaving the city, Dad realized we were low on gas, so we had to turn back and get gas before continuing onwards. The next stop was at the Moeraki boulders. These boulders are nearly perfectly spherical, making it look, as Mom’s guidebook said, “as though a group of giants had just finished playing croquet.” These stones are in some places broken open, revealing a geode-like interior; formed much like pearls in an oyster, the boulders of the Moeraki beaches came to be when the mudstone coving the ocean floor was wrapped about an object, layer upon layer, until the ball was released from the grips of the sea and rolled up by the waves onto the sandy shore.
Moeraki Boulders
We drove straight through Omaru, turned left up route 83, and followed the road all the way to route 8 at Omarama. This drive, on a clear winter day, is surrounded by the splendor of snow-capped mountains. At Twizel, we stopped so that I could get information about Black Stilts, the endemic denizens of Mackenzie Basin. I was in luck; the center there had just released forty-four subadults at the Tasman River delta, and a woman gave me directions to the spot. From there, she told me I could hike out on the shingle riverbed, and several pure adult black stilts had been sighted in the area. She also said that the Wrybill were returning from migration, an added bonus in my book.
Though we knew exactly where to go, the light was fading and Mom wanted to get to the village and take a hike while the golden rays of the sun were still shining on the snowy faces of Aoraki. Upon arriving at the Alpine Lodge, where we were to sped two nights, we unpacked our stuff into our room and headed off on the hike to Kea Point. Our room had a huge window facing towards Mount Cook, and we could see a bank of clouds slowly moving in from the south.
Fifteen minutes later, we had beaten the clouds and stood at Kea Point with Mount Cook rising in front of us in all its shining splendor. The point, however, was devoid of Kea, and the only birds I saw were a few Common Chaffinchs flitting about in the rocks. We hiked back down to the Alpine Lodge, where we went to the guest lounge to make dinner.
Mount Cook
This lounge is incredible. On one side is a kitchen, with three stove tops and a huge polished wood counter, while on the other are nine comfortable couches arranged rather haphazardly, with a gas stove sitting against one of the walls and another wall taken up entirely by an enormous window opening out onto a small deck. The view from both window and deck is of massive snowy mountains, with Aoraki dominating the scene. On the final side are three beautiful oak tables, two rectangular and the third in a perfect circle.
Aside from ourselves, the only other people in the lounge were a pair of Australian women, sisters we later found out. One of them was named Sarah, and just happened to share a birthday with our Sarah. The two sisters, Dad, Mom, and I discussed a myriad of topics over dinner, for which I had Raman, and then settled down into a long discussion about how exploitation of natural resources around the world without concern for the environment was putting the peoples of the First Nations, that is to say native peoples of all different countries, into poverty and destroying their traditional ways of life. The discussion lasted from around 8:00PM to 10:30PM.
I was going to wake up early the next morning to search for Black Stilts on the Tasman River delta with Dad, and needed sleep.
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