Our holiday training program has been in full effect since we arrived on the South Island of New Zealand. The short description of the program is this:
1. Go on long hike
2. Stretch, drink water, and massage sore muscles
3. Once sore muscles have recovered, hike more
4. Make sure the hikes go up … flat is not encouraged.
I say all this in good jest. We did find one relatively flat hike, out to a view spot of Mount Cook. It’s good that this one was flat, since we did it two days in a row. Only the secodn day had a good view of the mountain. Seeing this mountain is kind of like seeing Denali – it happens only when conditions are right and conditions aren’t right all that often. One girl who’d been staying in our hostel for 3 days said that the day we’d left “there were more mountains out than she’d known existed.” And that included Mount Cook. Here’s what it looks like on a sunny day.
The other couple hikes, though, went straight up. And, I guess, down on the way back. I’m OK at up, and Andrew’s pretty good at down, but together, we’re each other’s limiting factor. The good part about that is that it gives you good time to look at the world around you and the views you find along the way can be incredible!
