Bye Bye Mundane Life!!: Mount Cook & Twizel

We were on a roll now for getting free places to stay! Two hours north of Arrowtown we hit Twizel, a town the Lonely Planet says should have been demolished!! But for us it meant yet another hot bath, log fire and warm bed...not to mention home cooking! We came to stay with Kylie, one of Chris's ex-Antarctica pals, she runs a business in Mount Cook National Park and is unfortunate enough to have to live in Twizel (she owns a dog, and you can't keep pets in the National Park)!!! We are getting far too used to home comforts now, especially as the weather gets colder - there have been frosts the last 2 night, sleeping outside in the van no longer seems so appealing! The first day Kylie took us out for a fribee trip with the rest of her paying guests onto the glacial lake at the bottom of the Tasman Glacier...it was an amazing trip, carving through the iceburgs in a little motor boat - you feel so small in comparison to these monster lumps of ice! We had apparently been really lucky as about 200m of ice-shelf had fallen off the end of the glacier in the last week so the lake was full of massive iceburgs - who says global warming is a myth! The following day we went for an equally impressive walk up the Hooker Valley towards Mount Cook, with snow capped mountains all around us we were yet again reminded of why we love the Alps so much! I think Kylie might find us staying far longer than she anticpated, but seeing as Chris is at present sporting a tool belt and lining up the powertools in order to start on an endless list of joinery jobs, I don't think she'll mind too much!