Viktoria Goes Abroad: South Island Trip - Day 4

Soon after leaving Wanaka, we visited the Lavender farm. It was very nice and neat, as it was a newly born business - just a small house in the middle of nowhere, with a shop full of lavender products. We bought some gifts for our family members, had a nice chat with the owner who was selling them, dreamt a little bit about having our own lavender farm and then moved on.

Apart from compulsory stops for coffee and food, we did just one significant stop on our way to Mt. Cook Village. In Omarama, another nice village on south island, there are sheep shows organized for the tourists, so that they have an idea, where all those expensive Merino sweaters at airport shops come from. At first we just wanted to stop for a coffee, but the next sheep show was about to begin, so we decided to have a look at that as well.

We came to the big room with stage, surrounded by approximately one hundred Japanese. The show began with a short 10-minute talk about sheep shearing in New Zealand. (Every sentence in English was followed by the sentence in Japanese, from the cute little girl standing in the corner.) Then we were shown how to shear the sheep, at first with a shearing machine and then with a simple scissors, which is a way less common nowadays.

Merino sweater and our Japanese translator...

Sheep shearing demonstration.

Maybe I should be ashamed, as I am from Slovakia and we have some sheep in my country as well, but it was the first time I saw the sheep shearing, so it was quite interesting for me (but maybe not as interesting as for those Japanese people, who seemed rather ecstatic).

Pure New Zealand nature... and a bunch of Japanese tourists.

After that, the sheep shearer took us outside and showed us how his sheepdog can control the flock of sheep and at the very end of the show he let us feed the baby sheep. The only thing you could hear at that time was "kawaiiiiiiii", the Japanese expression for cute.

After this cuteness overload, we jumped into the car and continued in our trip to Mt. Cook Village. As we drove closer to the mountains, the country got more and more beautiful. We drove by the beautiful lake Pukaki and ahead we had majestic mountains. I have never seen the water in Carribbean, but I am pretty sure, it must have the exact colour as the lake on the day we approached Mt. Cook Village. (Better photos to be seen in the next blog post, where I wasn't lazy and actually get off the car to take some pictures.)

And here are some pictures I took on our way there.