Mt. Cook National Park

Cornelia meets Moa

We were able to find a  MacBook and a guidebook for New Zealand birds in a bookstore in Timaru in the morning so we were all set to head to Mt. Cook National Park.

We stopped for lunch at the touristy town of Lake Tekapo.  

Making lunch in our van's kitchen

Lake Tekapo doesn't really have much to offer except for a beautiful blue lake and a view of Mt. Cook (New Zealand's highest mountain).  Today though it was hidden by clouds.

Non-view of Mt. Cook

It does however have a statue of a moa, New Zealand's extinct Gian ostrich-like bird.  And a set of automated self-cleaning toilets that nobody could figure out.  Not even the Japanese tourists!  Actually a young German woman helped me out.  

High-tech toilets, lo-tech tourists

We also found this handsome guy, our first view of the endemic New Zealand scaup, a lifer.

Bird of the Day!

And well worth another photo:

We innocently arrived at the government campsite at 3 pm only to find it was fully booked.  So we quickly made a reservation at Glentanner commercial campground, 20 minutes back down the road.

Meanwhile we went for a short hike from Mt. Cook Village through silver beech forest.  These beeqches are not related to the European beeqches but they are related to trees in Chile and in many ways the New Zealand remind me of Chilean forests minus the bamboo.  We didn't see any new birds:  silvereye, NZ fantail, chaffinch and Eurasian blackbird.

When we drove back to Glentanner campground it was just packed.  People were waiting in line in the communal kitchen for a hotplate or a sink.  We wound up cooking back at our van Despite the cool weather. After dinner we walked down to Lake Pukaki where we saw a dunnock, New bird for this trip but one we've seen before in Europe.