Te Anau continued
Te Anau is the NZ equivalent of a small Lake District town that is absolutely bursting to the seams with tourists, walkers and holiday makers in the summer, but in the depths of winter a deserted shell of a town. I have only ever been there in the middle of summer when the temperature is above 25 degrees and the sunlight twinkling on the lake, so it seems like quite a nice place to spend a relaxing hour while I rehydrate after the ride. I had a wander around some of the camping shops, marveling at the never ending array of gizmos that people seem to need these days and think back to when I started doing proper walks as a teenager with a Vango Force Ten and a battered old Tranga stove.
I looked at the messages on my phone and realised that my friend, who's hospitality I was going to abuse, had told me the name of the road on which he lives, but not the actual house number. Channeling my inner Charlie and Ewan I set off anyway thinking to myself 'How hard can it be to find a house?'. Turns out that it was very difficult as the road goes all the way back to Manapouri, which is about 20 km. I ride up the gravel road for a few kilometres before I pull into the observation point and give him a call.
The observation point was fantastic for two reasons: it is positioned high above the town and so had unobstructed views of the Southern Alps, but also because it had a rotating sun dial type arrangement that was labelled with the names of the mountains. If you lined up the arm with the name and then crouched down, it was possible to see through the arm's observation window and see the object that corresponded with the name on the dial.
It turned out that I had ridden further than I needed to, so I set off back down the road and pulled into my friend's driveway and rode carefully up to his house thinking 'for God's sake, don't fall off now'. His house is a new build - only about 18 months old so the small riverstones on driveway haven't really bedded in, making the dismount a touch on the interesting side. The house and garden are in a fantastic position and look out over the Southern Alps. Over dinner we sat in his living room and would find ourselves drifting off into silence as we watched different gullies and peaks catch the last of the setting sun.
My friend is a maths teacher renowned for his boundless energy so rather than taking my arrival as an opportunity to slack off for the rest of the day and have a beer in the sunshine, I was pressed into service doing some landscaping. I hadn't expected this, so was slogging away in the heat wearing jeans and a t shirt along with a particularly exuberant red cowboy hat to protect my neck from the sun. In the last 18 months Alan and his partner have done a massive amount of work on the garden, but there are still some huge rocks amongst the 5 acres, sitting just on the surface waiting to catch the blades of his ride on mower. I think that these boulders are the remains of the glacial debris of the last ice age, but we ended up digging out and moving rocks the size of a car engine before dinner.