Tonight, I'm in Christchurch on the penultimate evening before we join the Coastal Pacific Train tomorrow morning for our trip up the East Coast on our way to Picton to board the InterIslander Ferry and the crossing to the North Island. This time tomorrow I should be in Wellington.
Covid wise the symptoms have receded further today with less sneezing & coughing but after a test this morning I'm still 'a 2-line Covid convict' at the back of the coach. I think it's going to be Saturday (5 days since tested positive) before I can really expect to be released. APT have provided plenty of test kits and I picked up another box for free in a Pharmacy this afternoon.
So, a few more facts about the irrigation water spray booms and Mt Cook. These facts may come in useful for my end of Blog Quiz!
The photo taken on my iPhone from the coach shows one of these huge water spray booms. Each section of the boom is 50 metres in length. I spotted one boom arm with 13 sections this afternoon on our journey from Mount Cook to Christchurch. The longest our driver, Scott, has seen is 27 sections so over a kilometre. Each section costs upwards of NZ$10,000 so a quarter-of-a-million for the longest one. They measure how wealthy Farmers are by the length of their booms!!
It has been another glorious drive through the Canterbury levels today. This morning, we left behind the Southern Alps which had a fresh coating of snow after a violent thunderstorm overnight around Mt Cook but grey skies soon gave way to blue skies, sunshine and fluffy white clouds as we drove the length of Lake Pukaki. The lake itself shimmering with the blue glacial 'flour' – microscopic pieces of mica and other minerals washed down from the Alps.
We then travelled on to Lake Tekapo to a small township of the same name at the southern tip of the lake to visit the tiny Church of the Good Shepherd, built of local stone and oak and erected as a tribute to the early pioneers of the region – mainly Scots. The backdrop to this tiny church was stunning as I hope the photo shows.
Back to Mt Cook. Aoraki/Mount Cook is the highest mountain in New Zealand 3,724 metres (12,218 feet). If we could have hopped over the mountain towards the west, then we would have been close to the Frans Josef Glacier where we had been a week ago!
In the Māori language Aoraki (Mount Cook) translates to "Cloud Piercer", a romantic rendering of the name's components, according to the Wikipedia entry: ao (world, daytime, cloud, etc.) and raki or rangi (day, sky, weather, etc.)
Whilst I would like to post more this evening, we have to be up and out of the hotel by 5.30am tomorrow morning and Covid is not giving me much sleep at the moment.
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