12 – jan 30: sunrise over mountains (twizel to all day bay)

it is very poetic that i have had the joy of seeing the sunset over the alps, and that now i have had the joy of seeing the sunrise over the highest austrasian mountain – mt. cook, in maori known as aoraki.

the legend

here i’ll quote from the guidebook – i thought its a cool story.

“aoraki was a young boy in the canoe Ta Waka a Aoraki, which was stranded on a reef and tilted to one side. Aoraki and his brothers climbed to the high side and sat on the wreckage. the south wind froze them and turned them into stone, creating the Southern Alps/Ka Tiritiri o te Moana.”

the mountains themselves are very picturesque. snow covered sharp peaks, bright blue sky… however i’m getting ahead of myself.

the hike there

as the hike the day before absolutely annihilated us, we decided to take the 4 hour hike early in the day. like, really early. as the ben, the bike rider, recommended leaving at 4:30, we decided to wake up at 4:45 and leave by 5:15 (sunrise as predicred by him is at 5:30am). suprisingly enough, with our preparations of breakfast and prepacked bags of the night before, this went successfully. on an interesting note, before the sun rises it is quite chilly, so we both ended up wearing far warmer things than we expected (but still taking the light change of clothes with us).

departing our allergy-inducing motel room so early let us see as the peaks of the mountains slowly turned into a light blue, then light pink color, until the snow shone brightly. the hike was fun – long, but fun – and sunrise ended up happening only around 6:30 (which is about 20 minutes after we started the hike – the town is about 45 minutes away from the mountains).

in one of the happier moments of the hike we stumbled onto a stream that was flowing in a most photogenic way among big rocks and kinda under aoraki (not really under, but aoraki was definitely on the background). dream come true! of course, everyone who comes this way has this photo, but i got the photograph before the sun shone on the water, which is how everyone else will get it. i’m not sure which one looks better – i could probably sit by that stream for weeks before getting a perfect photograph.

the hike back

i’m not entirely sure what “there” is – a lake with mini glaciers in it, surrounded by mountains? i guess its as good of a there as any other there in new zealand. we arrived there expecting to be first – alas, a 65 year old australian dude was there 30 minutes before us, and claimed he caught the perfect reflections in the afore mentioned lake. argh! i was not deterred by this, and managed to still get a few pretty photographs taken, before a magnificent moment when the sun rose over the eastern mountain, and started warming us up. we quickly changed into “summer” clothing, and proceeded to bounce rocks over the still water (by we, i mean oleg – i shot a bunch of short clips of him doing that) until the next person came along – a girl, about 15 minutes after we finished eating (yes, we were smart and took some powerbars with us :) ). on the hike back we actually met a lot of people (including the taiwanese students who studied with ben-the-dude-from-yesterday) going the other way (as expected). overall, a grand feeling of accomplishment rewarded us.

the ride to all-day-bay

we drove back to the hostel that kindly held over our bags (for safety), had a quick lunch there, and headed onwards down to the east coast. to continue the trend of the remarkable things that happened today, we actually met a pair from israel (nurit and avi), just married, and looking to get out of israel asap. very interesting – and i brushed up my hebrew too! :)