Mt Cook - Awesome!

We decided to stay in Queenstown for another day which mean't that we'ed ruled out the possibility of staying in Mount Cook for 1 night. Disappointed we decided to see what the weather was doing on the day we left and as it was 'sort of' on the way to Christchurch we thought we'ed make a diversion if the weather cleared up on the way.

We headed out in the morning from Queenstown and it was wet and cloudy and began the long 7 hour drive back the Christchurch. We've had the car for 2 weeks with no problems and 10 mins into this final journey a stone gets thrown up from the ground and we get a chip in the windscreen - aarrgghhh!! Well we didn't want to pay the over the top prices that we were sure Europecar would charge for the small chip so we tried to find somewhere along the way to get it fixed. BUT it was Saturday and no-one was working. Ah well we thought we would have to take our chances when we got back!!

So we carried on and around lunch time hit the turning for Mt Cook - the weather wasn't great, not raining but still overcast but we thought, what the heck we'll give it a go anyway. It took about an hour to drive up to the small village that sees thousands of tourists each year and as we arrived and had our first look at the map we realised that the cloud was completely covering Mt Cook, we could see other mountains but they all just looked quite normal and we began to wonder if we'ed wasted our time. We took a walk for an hour and saw some pretty impressive glaciers and then headed back for lunch at the village and on the way back the clouds began to clear and suddenly it came into view and wow, it really is impressive. We were so glad we had stayed and walked and then we watched the mountain clear as we ate lunch. On the drive back we had a fantastic view of the mountain with lake Pukaki in the foreground. Awesome!!