The Road Less Travelled

Saturday 22 February

On the recommendation of our lovely friend Suzy Fraser we took the road less traveled and went exploring up the eastern side of Lake Pukaki.

After a beautiful dawn over Lake Poaka and the first of many fascinating cloud formations overhead, we left Banjo locked up & lonely at the Lake, checked out the Pukaki freedom camp for another occasion then headed off up the Braemar Mt Cook Station Road along the eastern shores of the glorious Lake Pukaki.

With perfect blue skies and sunshine, the light on the waterways and lakes made them glow in an almost unnatural shade of vibrant turquoise. These lakes are all fed by glacial meltwater which contains fine-grained rock particles that are suspended in the water, making it appear cloudy, and as it is diluted in the lakes the reflected colour becomes a stunning tealy turquoise blue.

The tar seal soon ran out along the Braemar Mt Cook Road and we whizzed along on the best gravel road we have yet encountered, stopping regularly to ooh & aah at the views, take copious amounts of pics and for me to meet the local sheep & cattle population (spoiler alert- they were not as keen to meet me!). Round every corner you got closer and closer stunning views of Aoraki Mt Cook at the head of the lake, but almost equally as fascinating were the mountains and rock formations along the opposite side of the lake.

The route was paralleled by the Alps2Ocean cycle trail, which Whitefields will be taking on in around a month, and we spotted a few cyclists along the way. Susan & Mark will love this cycle day!

We stopped at the end of the road by Mt Cook Station at the Jollie River reserve and walked out to the braided river bed of the mighty Tasman (currently more of a trickle) which feeds the Lake with icy cold milky glacial waters. Here you can really see the "glacial milk" where the rock flour ground down from the glacier's slow passage down the valley has accumulated in large quantities and turned the water a stunning pale shade of aquamarine. As this flows into the lake, it takes a while to mix with the warmer waters at the far end of the lake, creating washes of stunning colours as it blends.

Heading back we picnicked on a stony beach still marvelling at the landscape and natures beauty. I was struck by the fact that our picnic lunchbox blended so well with the lake's colour - matchy matchy with nature!

Passing under the Tekapo Canal on the way back to the main road, we took a detour to the left and headed up Tekapo Canal Road only to discover a giant holding lake complete with salmon farm and massive sluice gates. The views from up here were phenomenal! I had no idea this place existed, nor that there were two gravel roads heading across the hills to Lake Tekapo, one following the canal.

The Tekapo Canal and Pukaki Canal are all part of an elaborate hydro power scheme run by Meridian Energy, and from this holding lake the canal was fed down to a power plant on the side of Lake Pukaki via two enormous tubes which ran above the road we had been travelling on. The huge metal structure at the top of the hill held 3 enormous sluice gates and ran on tram tracks so that they could obviously seal off the water flow if required - fascinating

We headed back to Lake Poaka, hitched up Banjo and hauled her over to Glenn Tanner Holiday Park for a couple of nights on power. We'd noticed some amazing cloud formations building up during the day - but this seemed to be peak time for them. There was one cloud which sat over a hill casting a square shadow below for over an hour. And several of the lenticular clouds looked rather like UFOs!

Driving up to Glenn Tanner we passed many of the landscapes I had admired from the opposite side of the lake and could look up these incredible valleys in closer detail.

Once we had set up camp, in another one of those "designed for Mohos not caravans" campgrounds, we wandered down to the lake shore and Louis did a couple of km in his wetsuit and I had a hasty dip - it was apparently 16*C! There were other mad people down there too - lots of squeals and shrieks as they braved the chilly waters!

Back at Banjo we had salmon from the High Country Salmon Farm for dinner and an early night ahead of the next day’s adventuring!