MOUNT COOK

2ND - 6TH MAY

We were up and away by 10 which wasn’t bad for us, our first stop was a trip to the internet as we wanted to save some websites on Antarctica, as we were struggling to get the trip we wanted. We had wanted a trip that actually crossed the imaginary Antarctic circle but all of the cheap ones were sold out and the only ones left were well out of our price range. After this we had another quick trip to the supermarket before setting off in the direction of Mount Cook. It was going to be a fairly long drive but we didn’t mind that. It’s quite weird with New Zealand it’s not like any of the distances are particularly long but they only have the equivalent of England’s A roads and the speed limit is 100 kph (62 mph) so it always seems to take a while to get somewhere, which kind of suits the laid back attitude of the place!

We got to Mount Cook late afternoon and the
weather was particularly iffy, so we couldn’t really do much! We went to the village and had a look in the visitors centre and we were in luck! The weather was supposed to be picking up so we were hoping that the forecast would be correct and we would actually get to the see New Zealand’s highest mountain from the other side. We then drove round to the good old faithful DOC campsite which was the only campsite in the area. We checked out the websites we had saved and were trying to decided which trip to Antarctica would suit us best. We decided upon one which went to the less explored Weddell Sea. Due to the expense of any trip to Antarctica we really wanted to get a trip which would suit us best and didn’t really just want a 3 day trip to the peninsula on a larger ship. So we decided that our first choice would be the Weddell Sea which hopefully will include seeing Emperor Penguins floating by on icebergs! These penguins are the largest in the world and stand a metre tall, not much smaller than