Oamaru is famous for two things: frozen meat packing and penguins. Forgoing an investigation of the former, we focused on the latter and were pleased that the two were unrelated. We had already had our first taste of real wild penguins, visually speaking, in Dunedin. We had stood, peering out from hides, as the exceptionally rare yellow-eyed penguins waddled ashore from their day at sea catching lunch. Unnaturally for penguins they are an unsociable breed, shunning company and getting shirty over territory. This, combined with the human encroachment on their habitat, is probably why they are now so rare.

Oamaru is home to their more sociable diminutive cousins, the blue penguins. We shivered in the dark and cold as bunches of tiny figures stumbled from the sea and sprinted across the path to their squawking and braying fellows tucked away in the hills and bushes opposite. Each day they make the 25km commute out to the edge of the continental shelf for their daily dose of squid - quite a trek for a bird only 40cm tall.

The weather cleared the following morning as we headed inland to Lake Tekapo. The scenery improved with every bend in the road so that by the time the lake swung into view, I had run out of superlatives. A clear unreal-blue expanse of water lay sparkling in the naked sunshine, bounded on all sides by snow capped mountains. Words cannot do it justice.

The air here is reputedly the cleanest and clearest in NZ - so clear in fact that distances are deceptive. Mountains five kilometres away seem like detailed miniatures just out of reach, and even those 50km away are blurred only slightly. The youth hostel's giant picture window that looks out over the lake at the mountains beyond must rate as one of the world's best architectural decisions. We had been incredibly lucky; the day before, when it was chucking it down in Dunedin and Oamaru, it had been miserable here too but, by the time we had arrived, the rain had passed leaving a featureless blue sky and a fresh dusting of snow on all the mountain tops.

As I sat by the lake with the sun setting behind me, the distant white peaks turned pale pink in the fading light and the sky behind them became a rich band of pink and purple as the light drained - something I'd never seen before. After dark we drove up a hill in the middle of nowhere to be taught about the universe by a Japanese astronomer who had the best classroom demonstration that money can't buy. We saw the Milky Way for sure this time - clearer and more obvious than ever - a giant brushstroke across the sky bisecting the Southern Cross overhead. As Orion sank beneath the horizon we squinted through telescopes and binoculars at binary stars and nearby galaxies.

The icy cold cloudless night gave way to a hot cloudless day. From the top of nearby Mt. John the whole of this spectacular glacial valley appeared with the sunrise: from the parched dry valley floor, peppered with small hills and sky-blue lakes, to the snowy peaks on all sides. We sat, in silence, and drank it all in.