Oamaru and Tekapo

I’ve been slaving away at work for months now (two and a half if you exclude Christmas and New Year) and reckon that it’s time for a break, so we’re heading south for a few days to Otago. First stop was Timaru, a place in transition from “deprived cess pit” to “nice place to live”. There was a nice park that is being given a facelift leading to the beach with a backdrop of a commercial port. I’m sure it will be a really nice place soon but we won’t be hurrying back there, especially since the drive there is bloody boring.

Omaru on the other hand was really nice. There are two major attractions there – penguins in their natural habitat and the Moeraki boulders. The penguins were great, especially when we saw one emerging from the sea, but since we did not have our binoculars (not unpacked yet), it was difficult to see them. They’re redeveloping the waterfront there too, but I think that it will be much nicer than Timaru when finished. They have a bunch of old buildings there that are looking a bit forlorn and in need of a bit of TLC to bring them back to their former glory. We also managed to visit the Whitestone cheese factory to pick up some very smelly goats cheese and an asbestos (well, Tupperware) container to keep it in.

On Friday, we set off from Omaru at the crack of 10 AM and headed up towards Tekapo and had a very pleasant journey. We went past the Elephant rocks (they filmed some of the Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe there) and a few nice sleepy towns (where we visited a geology museum to see if there were any old fossils in there that we knew) and the further we travelled, the drier it became. After visiting a couple of impressive dams (Aviemore and Benmore) and a brief pause to take some photos of Mount Cook over Lake Pukaki , we arrived in lovely Tekapo.

The choice of accommodation came down to basic or top luxury so we decided to slum it at the luxurious end of the market at “The Residence” (www.theresidence.co.nz) for a couple of nights. The next day we trekked up the impressive Mount John to the observatory and booked ourselves onto the night tour to see the wonderfully clear skies that night. Clear skies, my arse! We were disappointed by the cloud cover but we will be back, that’s for sure, armed with mountain bikes and binoculars.

Sunday we headed home to Lincoln , happy to be back, despite enjoying the break.

Back to work tomorrow and no more holidays planned until Easter.

Probably.

This entry was posted on 11/02/2008 at 12:18 pm and is filed under February 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

| Print