Mount Cook

At 3,755m high, Mount Cook is the highest mountain in Australasia and is a quite magnificent sight. For miles, you drive along mountainous roads and then suddenly, you turn a corner and there it is, looming above you, dominating the skyline. Well, at times it is, and at others, it’s just completely covered by cloud.

The Maori name for Mount Cook is Aoraki, which means Cloud Piercer and as we watch the clouds moving across, we realise that this is actually what happens. The clouds gether on the surrounding mountains and, as they move across the top of Mount Cook, they are literally pierced and dispersed. It’s a pretty amazing sight to watch being repeated.

There’s really only one place to stay here and that’s in the Hermitage Hotel (www.hermitage.co.nz) where I manage to secure us a $760 per night room for $175, complete with binoculars for viewing the spectacular view of the mountain. And there’s really only one thing to do here once the rain stops; walk, so we take the Hooker Valley track, which leads us across a couple of swing bridges and onwards, past the Tasman Glacier atop the mountains and towards the terminal lake. As we climb the final hill and round the final corner, we all delighted to notice huge lumps of ice floating about in the river which have broken off from the glaciers. I even hear a huge cracking; a piece of the glacier breaking off.

It’s taken us 2 ½ hours to walk here and we reward ourselves with our picnic, washed down with the bottle of Laurent Perrier I’d wisely invested our last Aussie dollars in as we left Sydney airport. We’d been waiting for the right time to drink it and this seemed like it. Our first true champagne (not that muck the Aussies call champagne) in 8 months and we savoured every drop, in spite of the wind and cold.

We’re very proud of the kids for walking 2 ½ hours back again, especially Harley who only needed a carry for 10 minutes and then somehow managed to run for the last 15 minutes. Crossing that final swing bridge seemed to give him super powers.

We were really lucky not to get rain and even luckier that the cloud which normally covers the top of Mount Cook has cleared today, a fact we only realised the next morning when it was pouring and with zero visibility. Giving us a perfect opportunity to check out the in-house Sir Edmund Hillary exhibition and planetarium show.