Omaru’s an interesting town, lots of large old Victorian buildings. They’ve also got this “steampunk” museum/exhibition and have really taken it to theme the town. Next to the caravan park is this foreshore playground with some absolutely amazing play equipment, the kids have a ball playing while I empty the dunny and top up the water tanks.
Steampunk H.Q.
Today we start heading back inland, we stop by the side of the road and visit a place call Elephant Rocks, a bit similar to Castle Hill, but this is on private property, but apparently the owner doesn’t mind.
Elephant Rocks
Through Omarama and into the real central high country. We’re heading to Mt Cook and the White Horse Hill Campground to do the Hooker Valley Track walk, so we turn off the main highway towards Mt Cook Village, fortunately it says the road is open, and we drive the 50 odd km up beside the huge and amazing blue of Lake Pukaki. It’s absolutely stunning.
Lake Pukaki
As we reach the top of the lake, we again start seeing the snow line getting lower and lower. Soon enough there is snow covering the ground. As we approach the turn off to the campground we see that the road is closed, apparently too much snow cover. That’s a bit of a problem. It’s the only campground in the area, there are no camping sites in Mt Cook Village, and the closest Caravan Park is 20km back. We visit the rangers station, to see if there is any chance the road to the campground may open today, The rangers tell us that it’s not going to happen, while they don’t volunteer it, when I ask about camping options they tell us as the official campground is closed we can camp in the car park of the village. We take a drive by, with all this snow it doesn’t look like a regular car park, so while a little unusual we stay!
It patchy cloud, so every once in a while we get some great sunshine. We take a short walk around the village and the kids have an absolute ball in the snow, this snow is much harder and icy than the fresh power we had back in Garston but still fun. There’s lots of evidence of rabbit poop on the snow, and Caitlin “Don’t eat yellow snow!”
Now that’s a Carpark….
We think about the Hooker Valley walk, it’s something I really wanted to do when planning this trip. Normally from the campground it would be 5km each way, but as we’d need to walk from the main road that adds an extra 3km, so it would be close to 16km return, in snow, ice and slush. We’d probably need the snow boots which really aren’t nice to walk in. In the end we realise it just too far to ask the kids to walk and we’ll have to give it a miss. While disappointing you’ve got to take the good with the bad.