What A Wanaka

Monday morning. Ugh. No, wait a minute, I don’t have to go into work do I as I am in New Zealand! Hooray! It’s the little things in life that keep you going.

Ahead of us lay Haast Pass – a potentially tricky crossing of the Southern Alps to get through to Wanaka and Queenstown. We had been persuaded to hire some snow chains for the trip as, with it being winter, we could get stuck in the mountains somewhere and get lost for days. So we thought we had better play on the safe side. We had no idea how to use them. We had planned to have a go at attaching them the night before, but we got side-tracked with blogs and barbeques. The real tricky pass was Arthurs Pass, but we wouldn’t be going near there, just in case. Along Haast Pass there was supposedly some of the best scenery in New Zealand, and it didn’t disappoint. A few walks through forests and a few waterfalls later and we had nearly finished the journey through the Alps. And it wasn’t tricky at all. The trickiest bit was trying to get a photo of Thunder Falls through a quagmire of Japanese tourists.

Roaring Billy Falls (off to the right)

We emerged from Haast Pass into the open fields and mountains around us, pretty much all of them still covered with a light dusting of snow on the peaks. We drove along Lake Wanaka until we hit the town of Wanaka. But before then we stopped off at Puzzle World. Let me explain. Puzzle World, from what we could gather from the outside, was essentially a wooden outdoor maze that you walked around in, which seemed mainly for the kids. Outside is the Leaning Tower Of Wanaka, a yellow tower leaning over at about 60^o. This was very important for me to visit as I remember seeing a friend of mine standing under it whilst she was travelling the world and I looked at it wondering if I would ever do the same. Two years later and there I was. Another one of those “moments” we have every now and again.

The Leaning Tower Of Wanaka

Wanaka seemed nice. More of a Gap Year/snowboarding/hippy hangout than anything else. We took a trip up Mount Iron late in the day, thinking it would only be a short circuit round the hill and back in the car in 30 minutes. The trail actually went to the very top of the hill and took us well over an hour to complete, but the views……the views were amazing. And it certainly built us up an appetite for that evening.

We found a convenient spot on the side of a mountain (not within the snow zone, thankfully) not far from Queenstown, which would be our next destination, and parked up. We had carefully navigated past a lot of farmers fields and gated entrances and were just off the road with a view of the mountains. I cracked open the third box of red wine and hoped that the view in the morning would be an impressive one.