Cold Comfort

Sometime last year when I was tiki-touring around the back roads of the Mackenzie Country, it was getting dark and I was looking for somewhere to set up camp for the night. I stumbled across a perfect place. It was a large, dead-flat expanse of grassland, right on the edge of Lake Pūkākī and totally private.

The negatives were that there was a vertical drop of about 10 metres to the lake, and it required a short four-wheel-drive trip in. The bonus was the view. I was looking directly at Aoraki/Mount Cook – so close it almost filled the viewfinder of my camera.

I wasn’t the first person to have visited, because scattered about were pieces of timber, some parts of a shingle roof and some framework. To me it looked like someone had been in here with a gypsy-style house truck and pulled it to pieces.

The place stuck in my mind as one of the most idyllic places I have ever overnighted at.