From Queenstown we drove on to Lake Tekapo. I can't help myself but think of it as "Lake Peekaboo" or "Lake Kiekeboe" in Dutch. First we dropped the intern at a road where she was going to hitch-hike to her next destination. Now, I may not want to become a mother, but as a woman I suppose you can’t help yourself still having motherly feelings every now and then. The intern is only 8 years younger than me, and I used to hitch-hike in the good old student days (although never alone), but I was totally worried and it lay on the tip of my tongue to tell her “DON’T DO IT, I’ll give you money for the bus”. However, not wanting to sound like my mother, and knowing she had a 99% chance of being totally ok and meeting wonderfully cool people, and understanding the want for adventure and cheap transport, we dropped her off and I just said “be careful, call us ANY TIME you’re in trouble, and have fun!”. Not more than an hour later (she wasn’t going very far) she sent a text message telling us she had gotten a ride within 2 minutes with 3 sky dive instructors, which was totally cool.
We visited Cromwell, a really sleepy town which main attraction are some old shop fronts they rebuild on the shore of the newly dammed lake.
Not surprisingly, we had a coffee there (did I ever tell you NZ is surprisingly good at coffee? The first bad coffee is still to be found). Thomas and me also bought many items in a quirky little shop. We’re not really materialistic in any way or shopping addicts, but not being able to go to nice little quirky shops anymore in Chch, we really went wild on this tour. We still have the mall next door in Chch, but it’s just not the same.
Unfortunately as we neared Lake Tekapo the weather changed a bit and so we didn't see anything at all of any mountains let alone the famous tallest NZ mountain Mt Cook/Aoraki.
Luckily there is always an upside to bad weather, and here it turned out we could visit the hot pools at the lake front.Lake Tekapo has apparently the clearest air/sky in the Southern hemisphere/world, and thus they build telescopes and you can do stargazing tours. But with the cloudy weather, this was not going to happen. So we cooked another pasta dinner for ourselves at the backpackers and played scrabble. Interesting question, does scrabble come in the same composition of letters in each language?
The last day of the trip came. We did a walk up a river to a hydro-scheme, 
took some photos at the lake (a glacial lake by the way) and drove back. 
Church of the good shepherd, the window/altar gives fantastic views of the lake and mountains
This brought us again through Geraldine and so we bought more jam and marmalade and chutney and souvenirs. The last stretch it started raining and the other road-users were once again doing insane things (New Zealanders are really incredibly bad drivers), but we made it back home safely. This was another amazing trip and it was soooo lovely to explore together with my friends. About halfway we realized we have never really travelled together, except school-trips more than a decade ago, but it went very smooth. And it was nice to have so much time to discuss our lives, dreams, memories of those school-days, life in general, the world, our world, the future, ... etcetera. The things you talk about with good friends.
