Aoaraki/Mt. Cook, N.Z.New Zealand, June 8, 2009
Sharon and I arrived in Christchurch last evening after a full day of bus travel and sightseeing. We boarded our bus in Queenstown at 8:00 AM and checked into our Christchurch hotel at about 7:30 PM. That’s a lot of bus travel. In spite of the fact that our bus drive/tour guide “rabbitted on” (talked nonstop) for nearly 12 hours, it was a wonderful trip. New Zealand is a place of wonder—from the Southern Alps to the glaciers to the snow fed lakes on the South Island, to the boiling mud, geysers, natural springs, strange birdlife, and glowworm caves of the North Island.
Photos from Queenstown to Christchurch are linked here. You will see lakes and mountains in abundance, each more spectacular than the next. At this point, our senses are so over-stimulated that we are mentally, emotionally and physically fatigued. If we were not coming home tomorrow, we might need to just take a day off to recover from a full week of aesthetic immersion. Is there such thing as beauty fatigue?
In my last blog, I talked about the names of things. The white man named the remarkable mountain range that runs across the Queenstown area “The Remarkables.” Duh! The Maori name for the equally remarkable lake near Aoaroki/Mount Cook was Tekapu, or “Sleeping Man.” As a species, is our capacity to create stunning visual metaphors inversely related to our ability to invade and conquer the lands of other peoples? Just a thought.
This is the final blog in the South Seas Adventure series. I hope you have enjoyed reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.
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