Mt Cook to Queenstown by way of Twizel

This morning, we awoke to heavy rain and mist obscuring the mountains. It made us realize just how lucky we were to have arrived yesterday when we were able  to see Mt Cook so clearly in ideal  conditions.
After breakfast, we investigated the Visitors' Information  Centre, which is to be found in the same complex of buildings  as the Hermitage Hotel. It contained a lot of interesting information about the area, in terms of its wildlife, geology and its importance over the past couple of hundred years for climbers learning their skills. Of course, Sir Edmund Hillary is the most famous of these climbers, and there is a separate exhibition about his life in the Hermitage Hotel. My blip is a collage of two rather lovely stained glass  panels in the Centre, showing some of the local native flora and fauna.
The rain had eased a little after about an hour, so we drove away from Mt Cook, across the Hooker River, and along the Tasman Valley Road to to take a look at the Tasman Glacier. This glacier has receded greatly over the past century and today it was looking quite grey and dismal from the viewpoint at the car park.  There are walks you can make from here, to get closer, but the conditions today were less than ideal for spectacular views of the glacier and Blue Lakes, so we decided to continue on our way to Queenstown, our ultimate destination today.
We retraced yesterday's route beside Lake Pukaki but then continued on to Twizel,(63 km from Mt Cook village) where we stopped at  the  Musterers' Hut cafe for a coffee. Twizel is an interesting township, established in 1968 to house  the workers constructing a hydro electric power station. When the work was finished in 1984 there were plans to abandon Twizel, but many of the residents thought otherwise and have a thriving community who enjoy the outdoor life there. I picked up a copy of the local paper "The Rabbiter", advertising all kinds of  sports and activities.On the village green there is a collection of large earth moving vehicles left over from the early construction days. 

Four weeks after we were at Twizel, and back home, I was completing a feedback form about our trip, and  googled the  Hermitage Hotel at Mt Cook, only to discover that there had  been recent heavy snow falls and the road between Twizel and Mt Cook was closed. We had thought we were there in spring after the last of the  snow, but clearly we weren't!  Our travel plans would have been severely affected had we encountered fresh snow, rather than rain.    

From Twizel we drove in mist and rain to Omarama, through the  Lindis Pass, and on to Cromwell. It is an old village, by Lake Dunstan, now partially a museum of old buildings but they were closed today so we didn't linger long and continued to Queenstown. Our hotel is beside Lake Wakatipu but it was shrouded in mist so we couldn't see the mountains across the water. It felt quite chilly and the rain persisted but we had an excellent Italian meal in a local restaurant which cheered us up. Queenstown is a busy settlement, and centre for winter sports and other exciting activities, like white water rafting and bungee jumping.   

Very, very late posting due to hectic timetable and poor internet connections  when away, and  procrastination since coming home!