Day 7, 10May09, Mt Robert

Today when we woke up and looked out side....snow. Emily was so excited, having missed her New England winter by coming to New Zealand. We found that in addition to eating dinner out of the microwave last night, there was no place in town to get breakfast, it seems it really is the off season and only die hard trampers are about. Luckily Emily had a few granola bars and some nuts..that was our breakfast. We decided to try to hike up Mt Robert, a mountain that Emily had come down when she hiked around here for 4 days in the summer. Going up it was socked in, we were in a cloud bank and almost turned around, but decided to try to see if we could get above the clouds. When we broke thru the clouds, it was spectacular, the snow was a bit deeper and the wind picked up, but the views were just amazing. We ended up going considerably farther than we planned, we just could not stop, it was so beautiful. We finally turned around and headed back down the mountain as the clouds started lifting out of the valley, we got some great views of Lake Rotoiti and the valley. We got back from our hike about 12N and headed for the next town of size to get some lunch. Our plan was to head south for Arthur's pass, but weather reports of heavy snow in the pass changed our plans, we decided to take Lewis pass from the west side of the island to the east, it is much farther north. The drive was full of beautiful scenery. We are now in Hanmer Springs, the major hot spring resort on the South Island. We had a nice dinner for Mother's day and then went to the Hot Springs, it was neat, some springs are filtered or fresh water and others are natural springs that smell like sulfur. The natural springs are pretty hot, you can only stay in them for a few mins. Depending upon the weather we may stay here another day or head up to Kaikoura tomorrow.