Lake Tekapo

Tekapo is a little town in Mackenzie County which is named after that folk hero sheep rustler I wrote about in my Kentucky blog, who stole hundreds of sheep with the help of his trusty dog Friday.  The people of Tekapo erected a monument in 1968 in honor of the sheepdog beside the lake, in homage to the hard working animals who made alpine sheep farming possible.  The brass plaque attached to the statue ends with "Beannachdan air na cu caorach" which apparently means “Blessings on the sheep dog.” 

     

Tekapo is the east lake, Pukaki lies to the west, sister alpine lakes. Both are bounded by moraines, a scoop made in the earth with a natural dam of rock and debris etched out by a glacier sometime around 12,000 years ago. Pretty young, geologically speaking.  Lake Tekapo is 120 meters deep, twice the depth of Lake Michigan.

The town boasts a Dark Sky designation (residential and commercial restrictions on outdoor lighting, streetlights have lamp shades and bright white light is banned because it gets in the way of viewing the night sky.  This part of the country has the highest number of clear days of any region in New Zealand.  All the better for showing off their cold, cold, waters and their bright, bright stars. 

This was my first road trip since moving to New Zealand, so I deserved a gold medal or at least a hearty side of whipped cream and raspberry jam for braving driving on the left and managing to get through multiple confusing Kiwi roundabouts.  To say nothing of the one lane bridge I had to cross.  One lane.  Not one for each direction of traffic.  One lane, with a sign for the direction of traffic that has to yield.  It felt like such an act of trust to cross that bridge, because it spanned a good 100 yards and everyone needed to follow the rules.

I almost gasped at how pretty the pansy looked on top of my cream, and then I saw a little red spider mite crawl out from the center of the flower and onto the white creamy background. I’m not precious, I ate all that cream anyway, I just brushed the little mite aside, using the flower as a broom.

Photo courtesy of Jose Gallego

The first thing I saw when I drove into town was the Old Shepherd Church, with the lake spread out behind it. The churchyard wwas crawling with tourists, a grey and brown lawn dotted in people wearing bright puffer coats in yellow, orange, bright blue. In the summer there are whole fields of lupines along the shore, spikes of blue and purple and pink and yellow. In winter we make do with puffer coats.

I had not thought either of these signs would be things I would need to consider.

As though I would not have enough to worry about in the throes of an earthquake.

Wanted, dead or alive?

I did see several wallabies, but just as unfortunate roadkill, both were in the process of being devoured by hawks (since NZ does not have its own vulture species the raptors are important carrion birds).

I parked the car and got out to stretch my legs, hiking towards the Mt John Observatory with the last few hours of the daylight.  The trail went through the trees for a brief time, yellowed aspens and larches, needles had dropped all over the path making it extra soft and quiet.  After climbing the first of many steep stretches I emerged from the woods onto a hillside where thousands of rosebushes sported red rosehips and resplendent thorns against a grey-brown background.

A group of aggressive rabbits thumped angrily at me, as I disturbed their evening graze.  I circled the bunny in this picture because it blended perfectly into the landscape and I would lose it again every time I looked away from the photo, even though I know it's there.

Everything that wasn't larch-yellow was this combination of grey-brown-rosehip.

       

I was feeling a little flushed and giddy, and I was still only halfway up the hill to look at the observatory.

I had plenty of vista views to stop and gawk at as I caught my breath on the side of Mt John.

Viper's bugloss.  These are admirable weeds, prone to growing in poor, sandy soils.  They have such vigorous little blooms with such brave barbs.

Dawn.  Stunning.  Brief.  In the time it took me to get from my Airbnb to the lake it had faded to barely pinks and baby blues.

I went to an astronomy presentation that took advantage of that Dark Sky.  The clouds behaved and we got a good view with the telescopes.  I got to look at several things you can't see from the Northern Hemisphere.

The Eta Carinae nebula, NGC3372, also known as the Keyhole Nebula, as seen by the Curtis Schmidt telescope at the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory in 1975.

You can't see the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, either, these dwarf galaxies that hover in the night sky so that even on a perfectly clear night they create the illusion of small wispy clouds. We also peeped Alpha Centauri the twirling binary dance (but secretly hiding a trinary choreography).  Like a throuple on the downlow?

The Milky Way was visible with the naked eye, and a few shooting stars streaking from the Aquariid shower.  After getting cold (and realizing how tired my eyes were when I kept spotting floaters every time I tried to look into the telescopes) we got herded back indoors, issued robes and towels, and then headed into the hot pools.  Because all traditional astronomy lessons should end with a hot tub session.  Our astronomer docent kept talking about the sky, and some of the Maori mythos surrounding the constellations they used for navigation and monitoring the change of seasons.  Certain constellations are upside down in my southern hemisphere perspective, including Leo who looks like a very precarious and silly lion, legs pointing impotently up into the sky. Orion is also flipped.  I like the Maori idea of what the constellation depicts, they see the three bright stars that I learned as Orion’s Belt as the branch a kereru, the native pigeon is perching on.  The star rises in the night sky at the beginning of winter, which is when kereru are fat from their autumn harvest of berries, and they are at their peak deliciousness. When you see the bird in the sky it is time for you to go catch the ones in the forest.

In the morning I hiked around Whakarukumoana - or the utterly unpoetic Anglo name: McGregor Lake. There were a hundred black swans in the water, and two hundred eurasian coots, funny black birds with a white rounded bill like a duck. They have a shrill, echo-y cry, and they flock close to the swans as though they were slightly misshapen cygnets.

I cannot describe how beautiful this walk was. I want to say nouns and hope it comes across. Mountains. Snowcaps. Birds. Light in water. Sky. So much sky. My eyes kept watering as I walked around the lake, the only human in a world of birds and grass and this one lone lupine, still blooming vigorously.