Frosty chill mornings. The hills are filled with an awesome brittle silence. Venturing outside cold licks at your face and creeps under your clothes, spreading across your skin like the lacy tide on a frigid winter beach. It's time to layer up warm and poke the nose outside, hopeful that in a few short hours the sun will rise above the peaks and flood warmth down the glens to percolate through from our toes upwards.
Here, walks, treks, tramps are isolated events. Often we see not a single soul out on the track, up the hill, along the river. The silence is a strange but welcome experience with only bird calls, rushing water and oddly, at this time of the year, cicadas chirruping away in the sunshine; presumably trying to keep warm - or a dog, disappearing into the undergrowth in none-too-close proximity to an exiting rabbit.
Hawea River Walk
West Wanaka Flat
Mou Waho Island from Colquhuon's Flat
Colquhuon's Beach
Towards Mount Burke
Colquhuon's Flat, return.
Roy's Peninsula, return.
Wet Dog, no lunch. Neg.
It's getting to the highlight of the local rugby season. The top four teams in the league will now play each other on a knock-out basis to decide on the eventual champions. Tense times down at Pembroke Park as the Upper Clutha Rams took on Wakatipu last Saturday to challenge for the final and fourth place. A typically UK sort of winter's day; rain had been lashing down for that and all the previous day. For those readers who don't recognise the team kits, in this shot the Rams are in the brown. Wakatipu are, er, also in .... brown. But the local team prevailed. We think.
We have ourselves been doing lots of exercise. Back skiing up at Cardrona; snow is falling and more runs are opening. But it's still early season and with the kids on holidays over the past fortnight we are lucky enough to be able to bide our time and enjoy later in the month. But still a good day out on the mountain.
Diane has had another lesson and was confident enough to take the new Chondola lift (alternative chairs and gondola) to the top of the mountain and ski all the way down. Three times ('ray!) with ever-increasing skill. She is still overcoming a fear of heights, however, and so has also signed up for a full afternoon of chair-lift therapy where she spends two hours on the virtual chair practising alternate deep breaths and screaming.
Intensive knitting courses continue, along with boot camp (crazy running, jumping and press-up stuff) and also D has signed up for yoga. Sadly, on the first night Diane mistakenly arrived at the advanced class, which left her in a difficult position. Boom! Boom!
We are very much enjoying our new pad, which also comes with pet cat, Tibs. She is very friendly, but does like to practice her River Dance technique on your head at 3.00am, which is an altogether new and rewarding experience. From our elevated position we get a stonking view down towards Mount Aspiring and some amazing evening and morning vistas.
