Lake Tekapo's church and the darkest sky in the country

Lake Tekapo sits in the middle of the largest dark sky reserve in the southern hemisphere, a whole region of the Mackenzie Basin that has fought to keep its nights genuinely black. It is one of the best places on earth to look up. We learned the hard way that the sky still has to cooperate.

We booked a stargazing dinner near the lakes and got thoroughly clouded out, less than an hour of patchy stars before the sky closed over completely. The operator quietly refunded us without our even asking, which tells you something good about the place. But it was a lesson: out here the darkness is guaranteed, the weather is not.

What did not disappoint was the lake itself. The Church of the Good Shepherd is a tiny stone church right on the shore, one of the most photographed buildings in the country, and it earns it, plain, weathered, perfectly placed, with the turquoise lake and the Southern Alps behind it. The water is that unreal milky blue because it is full of finely ground glacial rock.

The next morning we drove up Mt John above the lake for a coffee at the cafe on the summit, with the whole Mackenzie Basin and its impossible blue lakes laid out below. On a clear day it is one of the great views in New Zealand, no telescope required.

So come to Tekapo for the dark sky, but give yourself more than one night to actually catch it, and do not leave without the church and the climb up Mt John. The stars are a gamble. The rest is a certainty.