Tag 63: When the Ice Princess kisses you in August

31.08.2016

I am writing these lines to you, dear travel blog, in the form of a diary. The last night was less comfortable. We have a wonderful and way too big caravan, but the crazy lady at the pick-up station did not equip it with a heater or a functioning gas bottle - which I still had to pay for. Gudi is not feeling well and snores as if there is no tomorrow. I am slowly getting afraid that this saying could come true for us. I managed to convince her to use my sleeping bag so that she can enjoy some warmth at least. As for myself, I have to be content with the cheap blanket we bought yesterday. But I am glad to have given Gudi the warming area, as she is already too close to getting sick. This leads to my second problem tonight: The penguin principle and similar attempts to warm each other only work when you can actually sleep next to the other person. Unfortunately, Gudi sounds tonight like a blocked drain, which means that I regularly have to escape and ruin my sophisticated full-body blanket construction.

Now I sit in the driver's cab and wonder what luxury camper brings if you freeze in it like in a leaky tent. Desperately, I try to turn on the heating, but fail miserably with my stiff fingers. With my last strength, I now try to let my thoughts run free, as this is already denied to my bladder - leaving the camper now would be suicidal. Slowly but steadily, I type the letters into my wire companion and wonder what the starry sky looks like outside. It must be beautiful. Unfortunately, the windows are covered in frost, so this imagination remains an illusion. I hear a sniffle in the back of the vehicle and wonder if the upcoming nights will be better.

Gudi wakes up and tries to lure me into the sleeping bag with a guilty conscience. Although I can interpret her devilish strategy of first cooling down and weakening my immune system and then luring me into a bacterial hell, her sirenic intention cannot be avoided. So I end up next to Gudi in the one-person sleeping bag and share with her only about 1/3 of a cubic meter of breathing air under the woolen scarf we placed above us to protect our noses.

Despite the supposed death trap, I wake up a little later due to Gudi's exclamation: "You're an idiot!" and immediately think that we parked at an abyss. But instead, we are surprised by a breathtaking expanse of mountains and the typical New Zealand valley in front of us. We admire the scenery, try to free our limbs from frost in the first rays of sunshine, and drive to our destination for today, Lake Tekapo. There, a ice-blue lake awaits us, surrounded by steep and snowy mountain slopes. I try in vain to take a photo, but I can't prevent some Asian person from walking through the frame. Slowly, I am getting annoyed by the constant presence of them, as they (with a few exceptions) are chauffeured to various sights in huge tour buses, thus destroying any form of solitude or seclusion.

After breakfast, we go for a powerwalk and hike four hundred meters in altitude to recognize a paved road at the summit. The panoramic view of the cafe where we have coffee invites us to take numerous pictures with mountains, the cafe, and of course obligatory Asians in the background.

In the afternoon, we make more progress and with the help of a mechanic, we manage to flip a lever to activate the - not so empty after all - gas bottle. Maybe I should take back some of the curses I uttered against the lady at the car center as a reward.

As a reward, we have a cozy dinner at Lake Pokaki which is even more picturesque. From the camper, we watch the sun set into the lake, painting the highest mountain in New Zealand - Mount Cook - in a touching shade of pink.

Since pink is a girly color, I can't resist the temptation to do something masculine. Therefore, I collect wood in the twilight and dance around my incredibly masculine fire, while Gudi amusedly reads a book in the camper.

Gudi's glorious laws:

I'm not sick, I'm just slowly developing an allergy to your stinky feet!

I hereby officially declare that I - obviously and anatomically provable - have more attachment to my stinky feet than to Gudi, which is why I have no plans to wash them. After all, they enabled me to enter New Zealand, so it would be more than ungrateful to get rid of them. Besides, I consider smelly flat feet an absolute necessity in the land of the Hobbits.