While Lake Tekapo is a rather small town, it does have it's unique attractions. There is never a shortage of skiing, skating, and stargazing. John and I, in our dwindling time here, have been able to enjoy all three.
One of the perks of working at the ski field is free skiing and snowboarding! Over the course of the season John and I have been able to improve on our skills. Both of us have now attempted both snowboarding and skiing. John reckons he was a better skier than me right out of the gate--but don't believe it! My parallel turns are way better. Anywho, we've captured some video to share (and there is even some of me trying to snowboard!)
We've also enjoyed a bit of ice hockey while in Tekapo (well I enjoyed watching it and seeing John fall :) ). There is a local hockey team here that practices at the hot pools park and they invited Roundhill to scrimmage with them one week. It was great fun but a lot of of our guys had barely ice skated before, let alone play hockey, but they were all good sports and enjoyed trying to play. In fact, a few of our ski instructors were pretty good!
The next week we decided to have a Roundhill staff only game, just to attract more people to play. It was great fun to watch and John even scored two goals!
At the beginning, however, I was a bit too close to the rink during practice and one of the guys who wasn't great on skates swung around with the stick and I caught the end of it right next to my eye. The whole next week I was sporting a nice little shiner.
The other big attraction of Lake Tekapo is the night sky--which the town is trying to make a world heritage site. Being in the middle of nowhere New Zealand is great for stargazing at night as the sky is so clear and there is so little light pollution. The University of Canterbury has research telescopes at the top of Mount John right in town, but they also have one for the public and do nightly tours. We had a little deal with the local company that all employees would get a free day pass at Roundhill and in exchange we each got a free night tour. We had to call and cancel several times as New Zealand weather is so unpredictable we kept choosing not great nights to go. Finally, one Sunday it was a perfectly clear night and they had space for us so John and I went with two of our work friends, the Czech couple Pepe and Barbara.
It was a really beautiful night and we got to wear these big puffy red coats from the US National Science Foundation that they used to use in Antarctica. They kept you really warm as it could get a bit chilly on the top of the mountain at night.
The tour was really cool and we learned a lot about the constellations in the Southern Hemisphere. We got to look through one of the big observatory telescopes at a few different things in the sky--we got a really up close view of the moon and a star cluster that sits right at the edge of the Milky Way galaxy and is 13 billion years old! They were some of the first stars to form when the universe was created--the guy who was running the telescope was really nice and mentioned how looking at those starts--they were probably the oldest thing we will ever see in our lifetimes.
The coolest part of the experience for me was that you got to do some astrophotography. The really nice guy that works there takes your SLR camera and puts it on a mount that moved ever so slightly with the rotation of the night sky and plugs in a remote so you can get some long, and really cool exposures of the stars. He also hooks the camera up to a telescope and gets an up close picture of the moon. It was really neat!
I'll leave with your with some of the cool pictures I got.
