The Tasman Glacier, Lake Pukaki, Lake Tekapo

Lake Tasman

 This morning dawned without a trace of the "potential showers" mentioned in the forecast - fine by me! After packing up and reclaiming my milk from the girl who stole it from my bag in the fridge (???), it was off to the Tasman Valley (named after the same guy as the Abel Tasman Park - the first European to see, but not to land on, New Zealand. Hence why its called New Zealand, not New Britland).

Terminal face of the Tasman Glacier in the Mackenzie Basin,
next to Mt Cook  / Aoraki, on the left (not actually in this|
picture)

The Tasman glacier is the longest glacier in New Zealand, but its rapidly getting shorter. In fact, if my parents had decided to visit it the year I was born, the place most of my pictures are from would have been buried under about 760 metres of ice.

Iceberg in Lake Tasman. Its big. How big? Those little ones
in behind it are bigger than a regular sized zodiac (the
boat kind, not the constellation kind...)

Lake Tasman, at the glacier's terminal face, is not very old at all - it didn't exist in 1973. A particularly large calving event resulted in the current pool of meltwater. The lake is also fed from the neighbouring Murchison Glacier. There are lots of icebergs of various size floating on the lake, and during the Canterbury earthquake in 2011 (the one that shook up Christchurch), between 30-40 million tons of ice broke off the glacier and into the lake, causing tsunamis of up to 3.5m in height.

Not quite enough dirt to cover the rental car label. :p
I washed that window two days ago. You'd never know it.

Lake Tasman drains into the Tasman river, which is in turn fed by the run-off from the neighbouring Hooker and Mueller glaciers, as well. The river braids its way down an

enormous flood plain before flowing into Lake Pukaki. Pukaki (and Tekapo, too), get their incredible blue colour from the sediment (glacial "flour") suspended in the water (picked up by glaciers grinding away at the surrounding mountains). 

This glacial flour leaves a thin white powder over everything it touches. Like the rocks. And my backpack when I put it on the rocks. And me when I sit on them. :p

Fifty shades of BLUE. Okay, I'll let that joke die. Maybe.

I left the Tasman Valley and Daniel directed me to the hostel in Lake Tekapo, with many a "recalculating" as I made various pit-stops to take photos along the way.

Lake Pukaki

 My stuffed sheep (waaaaaaait - I don't think I've properly introduced you to my stuffed sheep!!! I'll have to take a good photo and do it in a post soon!) made an excellent co-pilot. Lucky for it (still doesn't have a name - I'm open to suggestions :p), it doesn't get sunburned through the window of the car, because sunscreen makes fur (and hair) slimy. I may have accidentally sprayed sunscreen on my braid. But its okay, I took a shower!

The little church from across the mouth of the river.

In Tekapo, there is a little church called the "Church of the Good Shepherd" (shouldn't it be sheep-herd?), which as been described as "ridiculously picturesque." I agree, except for the inconveniently placed parking lot in front of it. :p

The "ridiculously picturesque" Church of the Good
Shepherd. This cute and tiny little church sits on a little hill
on a spit of land sticking out into Lake Tekapo.

Lake Tekapo. I did not construct those
cairns. They were already there.
 I did construct a pint-sized one because
I needed to sit my camera a little
 higher than the big rock.

So far, the Aoraki / Mount Cook area has been my favourite place down here. I changed my ferry ticket so I've got a few extra days on the South Island, so I think I'll head up to Arthur's Pass for a night or two (see

all the pointy mountains :D ... not nearly all, who am I kidding. Not even the tip of the iceberg... you could spend months in any one of the places along the Southern Alps...)

The control gates coming out of Lake Tekapo. Both
Tekapo and Pukaki have gates on their out-flowing rivers,
controlling lake levels and river levels for the dams downstream.
I drove past the construction of a massive canal somewhere between
Pukaki and Tekapo. 

I've seen this in a few places, now. I think its all tourists doing...
but there were a LOT of cairns here. At the Blue Pools, too.
Hundreds. A small sampling is pictured.

Unrelated: Possums, often referred to as "New Zealand's speedbumps" get hit by cars. A lot. They're all over the highway, and people are encouraged to run them over (they're invasive and thriving on native birds and plants, decimating natural ecosystems). There are two things I wonder about possums. Firstly, a lot of the wool garments here are a blend of possum and merino. I understand the process for getting merino wool, but the possums - are there possum farms where they sheer possums? I doubt it. So do they hunt them, skin them, then try to get the fur off? Do they pick up road kill possums and try and use that? (Unlikely. They get so flat that you can't even feel the car going over them...) Also, the fibres are way shorter than merino fibres... obviously this isn't a problem, but it makes me wonder how evenly its spun together. This is pretty much the only road kill around (some deer have gone ferral, but I haven't seen any as road kill though), except from the odd magpie (I nearly hit another hawk. :| Less than a metre. What is it with birds and the cars I drive????). So I wonder if they have a road kill clean-up department like we do back home. Either they don't, or there are just too many possums to keep up with. Now, with all the dead possums, what would you expect? What always gives away road kill at home before you see it? The big crowd of crows. There are NO crows, or ravens down here. At least, I haven't seen any yet. Nada. The only thing eating the possums are various species of harriers (one of which I nearly took out with Tuck. But didn't. But it was close.) I keep noticing the lack of crows feasting on the carrion, though.

Something else I've noticed - I remarkable lack of garbage on the sides of the highway. Either a) people don't throw trash out their windows, which is awesome, except one of the girls in her fancy little high school uniform back in Dunedin most definitely threw her wrapper on the ground >:(, or b) they do a very good job cleaning it up. I don't have any supporting pictures for these thoughts, so I'll accompany them with unrelated Tekapo shots. ;)