Dunedin + Mt Cook

Hard to believe that I've spent a month in New Zealand already and I'm leaving just a short few days!

 

After Milford Sound I headed to Dunedin- the "college" town of New Zealand. It was a bit quiet here since college had let out for the summer and the weather was a cloudy and drizzling at times, but that didn't stop me having fun! They are some great tours to do in and around the city. The first was the Speights brewery tour. Speights is the most popular beer in New Zealand and they have some great flavors. On the hour tour, the guide gave showed us around this functioning brewery and we got to try 6 different beers! The factory has recently been working overtime- the other Speights brewery was located in Christchurch and since that was destroyed by the earthquake the had to move all of production down to Dunedin. They are brewing close to 24 hours round the clock here. The next tour was of the Cadbury factory. They gave us lots of yummy chocolate and it is awesome to watch all the high tech machinery they have to produce, package and ship their chocolate. Finally I headed south out of town to the Otago Penninsula on a wildlife tour. I was pretty skeptical of this at first but it proved to be well worth the money. I got to see a seal colony from about 50 feet away, including many recently born baby seals! We also got within ten feet of some sleeping Sealions, they are surprisngly not alarmed by any human contact. There were also some penguins that we saw! These can be a bit shy and skittish at times, but one of them was curious and walked to within a couple feet of our tour gruop!

 

After Dunedin it was onto Aoroki/Mt Cook National Park. This is the home of the largest peak in New Zealand- Mt Cook of course! It also contains 22 of the 27 other highest peaks in the country. The mountain ranges sit on a fault line and are still growing upwards at a rate of ~5mm per year as the plates shift into each other. With only one night to spend here and my bus arriving in the early afternoon, I had no time to spare. After checking into my Hostel, I went immedietly to the info center to plan my hike for the day. The plan was to head up to Mueller hut and then from there a short distance up to the peak of Mt Olliver. The path was only 5.2km long, but with something around 1200m of elevation gain this was no easy feat. The views coming up the mountain were amazing and just kept getting better the higher you went. The snow capped mountains were in every direction you looked. Occasionally, I would hear a rumble in the distance and be able to spot a small avalanche coming down one of the mountains. The hut itself was quite nice- it had beds, potable water and cooking stoves. If I had done more thinking ahead, I would have stayed here for the night. The views were already amazing in the early evening and I could just imagine how great dusk/sunset would have been. After getting up to the Olliver summit, I made my way back down. This included several sections of snow which I could just slide down. Much easier than climbing the steep elevation gain I was doing on the way up. Since I was so late in the day, I saw a total of 3 people going down. It was awesome being able to enjoy the undisturbed wildness. I would love to come back to this park again and do some of the longer multi-day treks... next time :).