P.O. Box Pukaki

Dear Mom:

Please have all my mail forwarded to Route 8, Lake Pukaki. I believe I have found the perfect place to live.

We have just set up our tent on a grassy slope a hundred feet from the most perfect looking milky-blue lake. A band of blue lupines guide my eyes to the other side where the Southern Alps rise from the water. In the middle the regal Mt. Cook dominates the horizon. As we sip the remains of our Kiwifruit wine, and over look the totally undeveloped, totally pristine, totally unspoiled lake, we wonder why we should ever leave.

Partaking of this beauty is well deserved following our afternoon spent dealing with things far less pleasant. The Heap (aka: The Yellow Golf ) needed a bit of attending to.

Ten kilometers outside of Pioneer Park where we'd spent New Year's eve, I smelled something burning. "Must be someone's else car," I said. Of course, at the time, we were alone on the rolling hills so I knew that couldn't be the case.

"No Sweetie, that's us," John said. "We've got brake problems."

Sure enough, our front brake caliper was frozen. If we kept driving like this, our brand new brake pads would be paper-thin in no time. "Let's look on the bright side," I said. Only I couldn't think of a bright side. We were miles from a town and it was New Year's Day. The thought of pulling apart a caliper didn't thrill me.

"We'll just keep driving," John said. "We won't smell the brakes burning up if we keep the windows up." This from my mechanic-minded husband; I was beginning to doubt his car sense. But we really had no choice. We were on a windy road with tourist buses zooming by every five minutes. So we drove an additional 18 km (grinding the brake pads) and pulled into the small park in the center of Fairlie.

There was no point in looking at the brakes then, they were way to hot, so we took our time enjoying a cucumber and tomato sandwich while the car cooled and we discussed our options. My idea was to talk to the man at the BP station across the street. Maybe they sold caliper re-building kits; maybe they sold brake fluid. Or maybe, as the case turned out, they could do the work for us.

While John and the station mechanic disassembled the caliper, I chatted with the mechanic's wife. They too had spent a year traveling. They too had had their share of car problems and they too thought it was the best time they had ever had.

We were grateful; the repair job set us back only $60 NZ. An hour and we were back on the road heading toward Mt. Cook and the lakes.

The first, Tekapo, 42 km West was disappointing. Bus loads of tourists poured into this picturesque town; we found it unbearable. And the lake itself was alive with the whine of motor boats. The land of the noisy tourist.

This wasn't for us. We pushed on. Eventually the tour buses thinned and the words "New Zealand Tours" were replaced with fields of lupines and the Southern Alps. One magnificent scene followed another; when we pulled off of Route 8 next to Lake Pukaki we knew we would stay.