Touring, Day 6

Saturday
After a rather relaxed day yesterday, we decided to go hiking around Lake Tekapo. We chose a path that brought us to a point on the edge of the lake from which we could see the snow covered peaks of the mountains that surrounded us. It was a beautiful site, with the mountains all around and the impossibly blue-green lake. After the hike, we drove up to the Mt John Observatory to find out about star gazing. The tour turned out to be slightly out of our price range, so we decided to find a nice spot out of town to see the stars from. Although the sun was below the mountains by 6:30, we waited until 8 for the sky to be dark enough for the first stars to appear. And when they appeared, it was beautiful!!! Because of all the measures the town takes to avoid light pollution, we could see the sky perfectly and it was absolutely filled with stars! The weird part was that we didn’t recognise any of the constellations.