We had a laid back start to Friday, with those who wanted to going white water rafting and the rest relaxing at the Rangitata lodge where we had slept the night before. I chose not to do the rafting, since I would have to take my glasses off and therefore wouldn't fully appreciate the experience. After a wander around the surrounding countryside with a couple of the German girls, we all headed off on the bus inland towards the centre of the South Island.
We passed through and stopped at a town called Geraldine for 20 minutes, home to a piece of knitwear of novelty proportions. Every small town in New Zealand seems to love being famous for something, and Geraldine is the residence of the World's Largest Jumper.
Of course, I couldn't resist going to have a look at it, so I went into the Giant Jersey shop in which it's housed. Hanging on the wall alongside its Guiness Book of Records certificate, the enormous jumper is patterned with lots of different squares, featuring sheep and the like. I asked the guy behind the counter who made the jumper, to which he replied "me". Wanting to know more about the intruiging world of record-breaking textile contruction, I asked if anyone had tried it on and why it was made in the first place. Apparently it's too large for anyone, but a family could fit inside, and it was made to give the store an identity, not the break the record. There you go.
Feeling satisfied with Geraldine after speaking to the maker of the World's Largest Jumper, I got back on the bus as we headed to the Aoraki Mount Cook National Park. Lisa (our guide, remember) dropped us off for a walk down to Lake Tekapo, which ended at the Church of the Good Shepherd. A tiny stone building perched on the edge of the lake surrounded by mountains, it certainly gave a real sense of scale to the place. The lake itself was beautiful, but superlatives like that lose their sense of scale when you're somewhere like New Zealand where everything is at such a high standard.
After our walk, we continued on to our campsite at Lake Pukaki, the glacial lake at the foot of Aoraki Mount Cook. Aoraki Mount Cook is New Zealand's highest mountain at 3754m and is called that to combine its Maori and European names. Our campsite sat on the shore of the lake in the floor of the glacial valley, completely surrounded by mountains, with Aoraki Mount Cook as the furthest of the peaks about five miles away. Combined with the beautiful (if windy) weather, it was ludicrously picturesque.
