I lift my eyes to the hills..

The Mt Cook experience is very difficult to top and after a wild night in our little tent, with the wind blowing a gale, I woke up thinking about “Night on a bare mountain”, then went out to tighten up guy lines and to ensure all was in order. The North wind doth blow.. which in NZ means the wind is warm not cold but we still had to hold the tent pegs in with large rocks!
We packed up at day break before breakfast and got on the road to Lake Wanaka by 9am. The scenery is still spectacular, but...... it really is difficult to stop your senses going into overload mode and becoming complacent and switching off to what is all around. There was a quote from Sir Edmund Hillary that we saw yesterday which really struck a chord with us both “It is an act of worship just to sit and look at a high mountain”. We’ve been doing a lot of that over the last few days and although the pictures never do the scenery justice, here are a few sights and wonders from around Mt Cook. For the non- geographers among you, the icy one is crevasses on a hanging glacier on Mt Sefton – height approx 10,000’. We’ll probably have to do 2 entries to get them all in, but hopefully it’ll be worth it.
We were brought back to earth with a bump on the news of the Chilean Earthquake which has devastated so many families lives and so soon after the Haiti earthquake. The tsunami warning for NZ’s east coast predicted a 1 metre high pressure wave on top of normal swell and we think about low lying South Pacific islands such as those in the Cook Islands group where we have stayed close to the beach.
We must strive harder to see all around us and not become blinded to the normal everyday things in this fragile world.
To cheer you up therefore and to remind us of the high points of our trip we have included some more pictures covering recent events.