Good morning, Sunshine

Finally it happened. this morning the sun appeared, reluctantly, like a timid animal. It was constantly threatened by cloud but it persisted and by ten o'clock, it was gaining the upper hand. And then, suddenly, it gathered enought strength to melt the clouds and Mount Cook appeared, its double crag set on top of a huge triangle of snow covered rock. It is an astonishing sight, rearing up nearly vertically at the end of the valley, a massive wall of rock tipped with white.

Later I drove through the high plateau that spreads out beneath the Southern Alps, a vast upland, now brown from lack of water, home to a million sheep and cows. I think it is where much of Lord of the Rings was filmed.

Lake Takapo, my refuge for tonight, is another of the emerald lakes, its colour created by the refraction of light as it is filtered by the stone flour ground up by the weight of glaciers. It's a small tourist town, but with a massive development on its fringe, which presages change in the near future. Above the town is the Mount John observatory, part of Christchurch University. You can visit and see the telescopes if you want but I went for a walk instead, two hours alone the shore of the lake.

Finally, to prove that the world is a small place, in the next door unit tonight is a retired teacher from Kentish Town. She seems oddly familiar and I suspect we have met before, probably in one of the local shops where we used to buy food when we lived in Camden Town. Funny old world, as they say.