Life is too important to be taken seriously

Dear all

The strap line for todays post was taken from a card in a shop window in Arrowtown, which was our first stop on our tour today. This very charming village came about following the discovery of 'gold in them hills' in the 1860's. Most of the highstreet is made up of the original buildings and has a very cutesy feel to it and we spent the morning wandering around the town, the museum and a chinese settlement on the outskirts. The chinese were subjected to intense racism and were inlegible to register their own claims so were forced to rework old discarded claims in terrible conditions.  There was an opportunity to go panning for gold, but the river was quite busy with young would be prospecters so we had our lunch and headed off north.

We decided to take the scenic route up to Wanaka which was windy and very beautiful. We even managed to find a pub in a tiny village called Cardrona that Dean liked en route! The road wound its way up to Wanaka and then we sped off up Hwy8 to the Mount Cook national park. The route was beautiful and as we turned off to take the road to the village itself we picked up a hitchiker from Germany who was travelling on her own. Now I would say that New Zealand is one of the safest places in the world, but I thought this girl was pretty mad to be travelling on her own, but she turned out to be great fun on our 60+km journey down past Lake Pukaki and into the valley. We had a brief stop to look around the village with the world famous Hermitage Hotel and then pressed onto our camping area, which was a really nice DOC site at the start of the Hooker Valley walk, which is where we are off to tomorrow.

Nite all
Sara