McKenzie country with turquoise water
Cromwell area vineyards
Now a proper school with 2 classrooms, a swimming pool and 3 teachers
My form of transport in the 60's !
Early morning Kea attack.
End of Hooker glacier a popular 3 hour trek.
Sunrise on Mt Sefton- the view from my bedroom in 1962 and 2009.
Sunrise on Aoraki Mt Cook.Driving up from Queenstown to Mt Cook via Cromwell reminded me of the one overwhelming memory I have carried with me of New Zealand. A beautiful day of sun, blue sky and crisp landscape saturated with subtle gold, blue and green hues. . At every place one stops there is a feeling of a relaxed comfort with life lived at a suitable human pace. It is a land that is full of peace and promise. I know that people still have everyday worries but this does seem to be the ‘Paradise’ that generations have come to the southern lands to find. ‘Paradise’ was a word Connie used easily, I much more cautiously. Unlike ‘Eden’- an objective and unchanging place of perfection, ‘Paradise’ is more of a human aspiration than a place. It changes under our own mental constructs, a dreamland with a spiritual dimension – the ultimate alternative therapy perhaps? Today was a ‘drive through’ Paradise, collect your visual ‘fix’ and move on.
Actually I moved on to two perfect days at Mt Cook, as Connie said, how could they have changed the dramatic mountain’s name to that from the beautiful Maori name Aoraki. Actually they now often use both together.
I decided against the usual tourist options of helicopter landings and jet boating, and decided to spend my time re-walking the tracks and trails I had known in 1962 when I was the schoolteacher here – a wooden hut and 5 pupils – albeit a bit more slowly now. Actually I think that if Connie was a young traveller today she would have done the opposite. She simply couldn’t resist an adventure, being devastated that she couldn’t try out the metal bucket on a wire rope that the goldminers used to cross the river . Today I think she would have been a bungy jumping, para-glidong, jet boating and mountain biking backpacker.
I particularly enjoyed the walk up Govenor’s Bush. This used to be just a worn footpath but is now a well maintained track that started right behind our little school – now a car park for a day shelter. There was and still is a viewpoint at the top, where the children and I often used to sit on sunny days to look out over the valley below and the high peaks around and talk about the plants, birds and geology that surrounded us. We sometimes talked of the wider world that lay outside of this “Paradise’ as these children would soon move off to secondary school in the cities and needed at least some level of preparation. I once saw a back-country rabbit trappers child sit underneath his desk in terror when first introduced to the experience of school. Paradise has its price.
Keas, those destructive but very human-acting mountain parrots are endangered but still thriving at Mt Cook. Gathering outside the warm hotel kitchen at sunrise every day, they fought, squabbled, screeched and cackled as they competed in their attempts to vandalise every vehicle and unwatched container in sight. Surely such determined birds could never become extinct. I remember from when I lived here before, being woken every morning with them taking turn to slide down the corrugated iron roof screeching as they went, terrorising the huge macho local dog, and watching them unpeg the washing from the line, only to carry off selected items for later destruction.
I hope my photographs might describe Aoraki better than my words.
Actually I moved on to two perfect days at Mt Cook, as Connie said, how could they have changed the dramatic mountain’s name to that from the beautiful Maori name Aoraki. Actually they now often use both together.
I decided against the usual tourist options of helicopter landings and jet boating, and decided to spend my time re-walking the tracks and trails I had known in 1962 when I was the schoolteacher here – a wooden hut and 5 pupils – albeit a bit more slowly now. Actually I think that if Connie was a young traveller today she would have done the opposite. She simply couldn’t resist an adventure, being devastated that she couldn’t try out the metal bucket on a wire rope that the goldminers used to cross the river . Today I think she would have been a bungy jumping, para-glidong, jet boating and mountain biking backpacker.
I particularly enjoyed the walk up Govenor’s Bush. This used to be just a worn footpath but is now a well maintained track that started right behind our little school – now a car park for a day shelter. There was and still is a viewpoint at the top, where the children and I often used to sit on sunny days to look out over the valley below and the high peaks around and talk about the plants, birds and geology that surrounded us. We sometimes talked of the wider world that lay outside of this “Paradise’ as these children would soon move off to secondary school in the cities and needed at least some level of preparation. I once saw a back-country rabbit trappers child sit underneath his desk in terror when first introduced to the experience of school. Paradise has its price.
Keas, those destructive but very human-acting mountain parrots are endangered but still thriving at Mt Cook. Gathering outside the warm hotel kitchen at sunrise every day, they fought, squabbled, screeched and cackled as they competed in their attempts to vandalise every vehicle and unwatched container in sight. Surely such determined birds could never become extinct. I remember from when I lived here before, being woken every morning with them taking turn to slide down the corrugated iron roof screeching as they went, terrorising the huge macho local dog, and watching them unpeg the washing from the line, only to carry off selected items for later destruction.
I hope my photographs might describe Aoraki better than my words.
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