Wanaka

Wanaka is a resort town just an hour north of its better-known neighbor Queenstown, but happily it is not at all like that over-caffeinated tourist mecca.  Wanaka is quieter, with less crowds, less partying, and with far fewer stores hawking testosterone-fueled activities.  I admit Queenstown is prettier (which I’ll show you in a post soon), but Wanaka is pretty enough, and a nice place to chill out for a week.  Getting there from Mt Cook takes us through Landis Pass, which is austerely beautiful.  Wanaka itself snuggles up against the lake of the same name, with the high and jagged peaks of Mt. Aspiring National Park visible in the far distance.  The pictures below show you the lake from Wanaka’s long beach (under different weather conditions, I might add!).

Downtown Wanaka is mostly a couple of streets with more cafes than anything else, displaying its touristy but low-key personality.  There really isn’t much to do in Wanaka other than chill, but it is a nice spot both for chilling and as a base to explore outlying attractions such as the nearby Rippon Vineyard, Central Otago’s oldest vineyard.   For perspective, it was established in 1982, nearly a decade before most of New Zealand’s wineries (it’s amazing how young NZ is, in every respect).   If you begin to suspect that we have chosen this region for it’s wines, you’re partly right.  The Central Otago wine region is very far south, at a latitude where grapes would not be expected to do well.  However, the surrounding high mountains apparently retain heat and the valley reaches some of the highest, albeit very variable temperatures, in NZ .  This area produces some of the country’s best Pinot Noir (and Pinot Gris).  A number of small but very good wineries are located near the hamlet of Bannockburn, and an

example of this area is shown above.  One particular winery, Mt. Difficulty, was amazing  – magnificent wines, very pricey, but we bought a few bottles anyway.  Didn’t someone tell us that life’s too short to drink cheap wine?  We also had an incredible and memorable lunch in their restaurant overlooking the vines – fabulous duck with their fabulous wines is about as good as it gets.  Some of the wineries in his region are very boutique – for example, Gate 20 Two, making great wines and selling them from their home – their “cellar door”, New Zealand-speak for tasting room, is from a desk in the foyer of their house!

We decide to do a nearby hike, to Diamond Lake.  On the way we see Kiwis enjoying life up in the air, on paragliders.  They glide and soar wherever they want, and it is clear they could stay up there forever; must be good updrafts.  I’m envious, really, but there is something comforting about having feet in contact with earth, and hiking is good too.

The hike to the lake is flat, and the lake (picture above) is nice, but the overlook beckons.  Unfortunately it is up, and up, using the ubiquitous D.O.C. stairs, and Ginger hates it;

which she voices more than once, but gamely carries on.  The overview of Diamond Lake and the nearby mountains is very nice indeed, and worth the climb.  However, the trail keeps going, beckoning us on.  Alas, it also keeps going up, and after awhile Ginger has had enough – but not before we get a nice overview back towards Wanaka.

On the hike we’ve also observed some interesting plants and birds along the trail, as shown below.

Rob Roy Valley

Mt. Aspiring National Park is one of NZ’s largest and is Wanaka’s outdoor playground.  Today we’re off to hike the Rob Roy Valley, listed as “an easy route into a dramatic alpine landscape that includes snowfields, glaciers, sheer rock cliffs and waterfalls”.  Sounds great!  Of course, “easy” is one of those relative terms, isn’t it?

The hour ride to the trailhead is through grazing land surrounded by old dry mountains, with occasional impressive waterfalls.  The view straight ahead isn’t bad either, right

picture.  What we didn’t know then is that the glacier straight ahead is the one we’re going to hike to, and its kinda “up” more than “easy”.  Our road gives way to gravel for 2o miles, and it’s slow going because of the gravel, because we need to navigate past sheep, and because we need to ford gulleys and streams – like 7 of them.  It’s not trivial!  We’re navigating water and good-sized rocks, and hey!  This is my car!  Not some rental!  Ginger offers suggestions on which rocks or holes to avoid, of course, in a stressed voice, which is very helpful.  Later we read the D.O.C. pamphlet, which says “The last 6 miles … is subject to washouts and flooded creeks which can make it impassable.”  I love the Kiwi understatement; I would think twice about doing this trip on a cloudy day, when getting into the park on this dead-end road was possible, but getting out after a rainfall was not.

At last we’re at the trailhead, and it’s pretty.  The valley floor and mountains are impressive, the rock-strewn Matukituki River is adding a merry song, and a waterfall drops out of a mountain to complete the picture.

Initially the hike is through an almost-flat wildflower-filled meadow bordered by the Matukituki river crashing into boulders.

We cross the river over a swing bridge and begin hiking along a beautiful trail that parallels the gorgeous Rob Roy Stream.  The trail is 5 miles up, and not terribly steep, but it is 5 miles up!  However, hiking beside merrily singing water in a very green, very varied beech forest is a delight, as the pictures show!

We finally come out of the forest and are greeted by a spectacular view of the Rob Roy Glacier on Mt. Alta.  Oh, maybe you notice the waterfall too?  It’s magnificent!

We disappear into forest again, and reappear with a better view of the waterfall.  The water is falling such a distance, it turns into mist at the end.  We’re captivated!

Then a bit more climbing up and down on a rocky trail like the one to the left, and we come to the view shown in the two images below ….  A wall of waterfalls pouring from the melting glaciers.  You need to mentally paste the two images together.

The mountains and waterfalls are truly amazing.  Alas, the trail ends here; we would have to bushwhack to get closer.  I’d love to do that, but it would mean fording the Rob Roy Stream, slowing the earth’s rotation to get more light hours, etc.,etc., so I must be content.  Below are close-up photos of the waterfalls.  It’s hard to know how tall they are, but I’m guessing some of them must be hundreds of feet high.

We’re starting to lose light, so it’s time to go.  As we start to hike out, I’m not quite ready to stop looking, so here are a few more views of my favorite two waterfalls.

The trail on the way back now has slanted light, and it’s as pretty as ever.  Maybe prettier.

The slanting light of early evening transforms the Matukituki Valley into a play of color and shadow.

The trip out is through the cow pasture, with one cow guarding the gate.  Happily, no bull is in sight.   We moo a greeting and are allowed to leave.

However, it isn’t over yet!  There are more pretty sights on the way out –

and hurdles to overcome.

We thought it was a gorgeous hike.  Hope you liked it too.

Next post, Milford Sound!

This morning we’re doing that rare thing, for us – taking a commercial tour.  We want to get up close and personal with a glacier, so we’ve booked a bus-hike-boat trip on Tasman Lake where we hope to see some icebergs that have calved from the Tasman Glacier, and hopefully get a close look at the glacier itself.
The weather in this national park is notoriously fickle.  Often a pall of low-lying clouds and rain hangs over the valley, but today it’s supposed to be clear.  From our bedroom balcony the day is starting out cloudy, but as seen below the views are still gorgeous (What a

wonderful wake-up view!).  Fingers crossed for clear skies, we hop on the bus and head toward the glacier.

A short bus ride later we arrive at the trail head (Blue Lakes Trail) and take an easy 20 minute hike across the valley floor.  The sky is clearing, but the land is desolate as far as the eye can see.  As Ginger noted in the previous post, the plain is the moraine from the retreating glacier, the debris is about a mile deep(!), and the fill is very loose.  So in spite of high rainfall, the water just drains through, effectively creating desert conditions on the surface.  It might as well be a moonscape, just gray rock, gravel and dust.

We top a moraine wall and there it is – Tasman Lake, an ominous gray color that we weren’t expecting.  The guide tells us the color is from rock flour, ground up rock particles that haven’t settled out yet.  We’ve seen rivers of gray glacial run-off, but never a whole lake of it!  It definitely adds to the forbidding nature of the landscape.  An interesting side note – the river that flows out of Lake Tasman empties into Lake Pukaki (see previous post); on the way, the water sheds the larger rock particles, leaving smaller ones that scatter light to give Lake Pukaki its other-wordly blue color.  Pretty amazing to give the very long and large Pukaki Lake that color, seemingly throughout.

Tasman lake, virtually opaque and with a temperature just above freezing, is devoid of any life and looks it with its cadaverous grayness, but the surrounding mountains and playful clouds are beautiful.  The last two images below show the back side of Mt Cook and its hanging glaciers.

We’re heading off to the glacier front in a boat just like this one, and we’ve managed to snag the front seat!  There are icebergs on the lake today, but the wind has blown them all back to the glacier end of the lake.  As part of the safety talk, we are instructed to put our hands in the water for about 30 seconds; it very quickly becomes painful, and we can’t wait to pull our hands out.  Take-away lesson:  do not fall in!

As we motor out, we pass a small waterfall coming out of the clouds.  Pretty, but the main attraction is dead ahead.  Impressive!  The glacier fills the valley floor from side to side; it is crowned with a layer of rock debris, but we can’t begin to estimate its height – the mountains around it are too large to give a sense of scale.  We can’t get too close because 1) a calving chunk could send waves that might dump us into that frigid water (the glacier moves forward at a speedy 9 inches a day), and 2) a piece of the underwater shelf that extends up to 200 feet from the glacier could break off, pop to the surface, and flip the boat.  Definitely undesirable but highly unlikely – but them’s the rules.  Still, we get reasonably near, as shown below.

It’s time to look at some icebergs up close.  First we haul out some little ones.

Our guide fishes one out and passes it around.  We spot a bigger one, and she lets Ron fish this one out, with Ginger hanging on to his belt to keep him in the boat.  The ice floating in the lake is about 300 years old – it has taken that long to move down the glacier escalator – and the ice exists as large, inch-sized crystals, which you can begin to see in the last image above.  The crystals were originally formed under high pressure and low temperature, but once free of the glacier and at lower pressure and higher temperature, the crystals grow and air pockets form, causing the ice to appear whiter.  Some examples of iceberg crystals are shown below.

We were tugging on the iceberg in the picture below when it started to roll, causing the guide to beat a hasty retreat, but the iceberg righted itself (darn!).  It did give us a look at some of the underside, which was perhaps closer to original crystal size.

The air bubbles in the ice were also interesting.

Finally, below are pictures of icebergs with their blue hue.

Well, we didn’t see glacier-front calving or shelf flipping, but communing with the icebergs was interesting.  As we hike out to our waiting bus, we notice a nice waterfall on a side mountain that we had missed.  Dime a dozen, eh?

It’s early afternoon, so we decide to do at least part of a hike that we haven’t done (we’ve done most!).  The hike goes down the Hooker Valley to Hooker Lake and, at it’s end, the Hooker Glacier.  More of the same, really, so we won’t go too far.  First, however, another look at the majestic Mt. Cook!  And on the right, the Huddleston Glacier of Mt. Sefton.  Awesome!

The Hooker Valley trail goes up before it goes down; in the first picture we’re looking down on Mueller Lake and the first of several swing bridges that we’ll have to cross.  Pictures from the hike follow.

As we’re hiking out, Ginger comments that the bush on Mt. Wakefield looks a lot like a chess knight.  Yes, it does!

Tomorrow we leave this gorgeous place, but I take a few last shots of the mountains at night, and later, of Lake Pukaki as we depart.  This has definitely been one of the high points of our New Zealand sojourn.

The South Island is where NZ’s superlatives lie: it boasts the tallest mountains, largest river, deepest lakes, and wildest and most remote areas (some still unexplored, at least by modern man).  It also has regions that are the country’s driest, wettest, hottest, coldest, and windiest.  We’re going to the tall mountain region, the Aoraki/Mt. Cook National Park.  Aoraki is Maori for “cloud piercer”, and Aoraki is increasingly used instead of Mt. Cook, which is NZ’s tallest mountain at over 12,000 ft.

The drive into this central part of the South Island is definitely scenic.  The plants in the

right picture are tussock.  They’re protected, and quite beautiful, covering huge plains and growing up the sides of mountains.  There are a variety of types, including this red tussock.  Apparently they grow slowly; some plants are centuries old (!).  The plants blow in the wind like waves in the sea.  Mesmerizing.

On the way we pass Lake Tekapo, and are stunned by the amazing blue color of the lake.

It’s an other-worldly blue!  We stop to stare, and we are not alone.  People in RV’s have pulled up, taken out lawn chairs, and are just sitting and wordlessly staring.  A marvelous, incredible color; we are amazed and perplexed by how it could be.

Traveling further, we come to Lake Pukaki and the turn-off to Mt. Cook, and are blown away.  Lake Tekapo was just the warm-up!  The color of Lake Pukaki is other-worldly on steroids!  Surely it is Photoshopped!  Can’t be real!  I rub my eyes, it’s still there.

And to add to the spectacle, the mountains loom gloriously.  It’s a long lake, and the views

are just incredible as we travel toward Mt. Cook for nearly an hour.  For example, this picture to the left.

We’re thinking it can’t get any more spectacular, and then we go around a corner to see a craggy mountainside with a glacier glomming to it and waterfalls/rivers tumbling down.  Wow.  We begin to see why Edmund Hillary trained for Everest here.

We have splurged and are staying in the major (and historic) lodge, the Hermitage – as it turns out, a very good move.  The pictures below show the view from our bedroom balcony.  Awesome!  For perspective, there is a car on the road in the right picture.  Those rocks are big!

I decide to hike to an overview, Kea Point, to take pictures of Mt Cook as the sun sets.  Ginger points out that means hiking back in the dark and she won’t go, but she’s a pessimist.  The view from our room as the sun starts thinking about setting is amazing.

The hike to Kea Point is just a few miles and is uneventful.  The overview is interesting.  As you’ll see in the pictures below, Mt Cook is straight ahead, but in front is an enormous trench (and small lake) created by the retreating Mueller glacier, which is out of sight around a bend.  The wall on the other side is the “lateral moraine”, debris left by the retreating glacier.  It is an impressive wall of debris.  Mt. Sefton is to the side, and the waterfalls from the glaciers are fascinating.  It is impossible to know the scale, but the waterfalls must be hundreds of feet in height.  Finally the sun sets on Mt. Cook, and the view is nice, but not as impressive as I had hoped.  Alas, on the walk back I miss a turn and walk a couple of extra miles, costing me daylight, and I end up twisting the same stupid ankle in the dusk.  Could Ginger have been right?

The next  morning we are greeted by Mt. Cook.  It is posing for us – Aoraki, the Cloud Splitter.  It’s magnificent.  For Maori, the mountains are sacred; I’m not far behind.  Mountains are so old, and so awesome.  In their womb they were simple sediment, compressed under enormous pressure when the world was under water.  They were born by cataclysmic forces of heat and pressure and volcanoes and tectonic plates, brutally thrust upward with unimaginable force to these incredible heights, and aged by wind and water over many millions of years so that we could one day stare at these monuments – these crystallized forces – that silently dwarf humankind’s silly bravado.  I stare at the mountain’s timeless grandeur, and I see America’s backwards politics and petty strutting and our daily big concerns for what they really are – little insignificant blips in the story of this planet.  When there’s a rock like that in front of you, you can only stand there, mouth agape, and make space in your head for something akin to religion; like the Maori.  Below are a few more pictures of this marvelous valley.

That ankle seems to serially sprain, so I decide to have it looked at in the nearby (hour away) town of Twizel – which allows me to drive along Pukaki Lake again.  The sky is different, and the lake color is different, but it is still other-wordly.

Alert!  This is Ginger now.  While husband is off seeking succor for his self-inflicted wounds , I decide to take a short hike through Governors Bush, just a 10 minute walk from the hotel.  It’s cloudy and threatening rain, but my jacket is waterproof, so I head out, expecting an easy walk around a garden-like area.  Instead I discover I’m heading rapidly uphill on some of the DOC’s infamous stairs.  Oh, well, so much for a leisurely morning mosey.  I decide to snap some pics with my iPhone, so Ron can see what he missed.

The walk up this hillside “bush” is a stark contrast to the arid plain below.  Here everything is lush and green, an abundance of ferns and mosses, lichens on rocks, and epiphytes hanging from the tall trees.  I discover later that there is, indeed, plenty of

 rainfall in this area, hence the lushness of Governor’s Bush.  The plain, however, is arid because it lies on a very deep, very porous moraine, and has only a shallow layer of topsoil.  Water simply pours right through, leaving desert conditions in a rainy land!

After a bit of climbing, the path begins to level out (left picture below).  It’s lovely, but dense enough that I don’t think I’ll find any mountain views.  I’m not far from wrong, although I do catch an occasional glimpse of the peaks across that arid plain, and the clouds playing Ring Around the Mountain with Mt. Aoraki.

The DOC has labeled some of the plants and trees.  It’s kind of fun to be able to see their names -Turpentine Scrub, Bog Pine, Bush Snowberry – though I know I won’t remember them for long.

The path meanders through the upland forest for a while, but what goes up must inevitably come down; I round a bend and begin descending through the forest;

the understory becomes more & more densely crowded with ferns, many I’ve never seen before .  Unfortunately, only one kind, seen earlier on the trail, has a name tag (left picture).  Others remain unidentified. 

Later in our travels I see the relatively rare Prince of Wales fern, which looks a great deal like the last fern pictured.

On the way down the trail I’ve caught glimpses of a waterfall across the river; when I emerge from the woods, I decide to get a better look and bushwack up the river bank to find it.  After some rock scrambling I locate a spot with a clear shot.  The falls is relatively small, but still quite pretty. 

There’s an added bonus – on my way back from the falls, I discover a picturesque stream, incredibly clear, dotted with bunches of yellow monkey flowers.

I head back up the hill to the hotel, pleasantly tired and ready to put my feet up for a bit while I await the return of my wounded warrior.

Well, the local doc thinks the ankle may have a tendon broken, but it feels pretty good moving back and forth (less so side-to-side, but it’s taped to resist that; the doc says to see an orthopod when we get to Wanaka).  She also says I’m OK to go, so I’m off on a hike.  Ginger says she has had enough for one day, so I am on my own.  I decide to do the hike to Mueller Hut – I saw the trail-head on the way to Kea Point.  The hike is listed as “challenging”; just 6 miles RT, but it’s vertical; a 3,000 ft ascent, taking 6-8 hours.  I don’t have that much time by now; it’s 2pm.  However, 1800 ft up is the Sealy Tarns, and I can do that.  That part of the trail is dubbed “stairway to heaven” and includes 2200 steps.  Oh boy.

The trail starts off pretty nicely, as shown in the picture below, top left.  The canopy of trees is mixed, and there are a number of different shrubs and plants with small white flowers.

And then come the steps.  And more steps.  Oh my!  And more steps.  I am impressed by the industry of the DOC (Dept of Conservation) that builds these trails.  The trail is very,

very steep indeed, and steps are an efficient way to go up.  And up we go, oh so efficiently!  Perhaps you can see from the angle of the hill how steep the incline is!  Sometimes I can put my foot on one step and touch 6 steps up with my hand.  That’s not stairs, that’s a ladder!

Since you can see just pieces of the view in these images, here’s a better sample.  It’s pretty up here.

I continue to go up, and I’m approaching the cloud ceiling, and whoa!  Way up here, nose-bleed height, and the DOC has decided to pour a concrete path on the trail!  Yikes!  Who carried the bags of cement, water and wheelbarrow?  The DOC is impressive indeed – or perverse, I suppose, if you work for them.  Come to think of it, I’ve had bosses like that ….

And then suddenly I round a switchback, and I’m there.  The Sealy Tarn is disappointingly

small – a pond really – but the view around is not bad, shown below.  It’s similar to what you’ve already seen, just from a little higher up.  Can you see the blue ice in the glacier dead ahead of the Sealy Tarn, shown in the last image below?  It’s visible even in this dull overcast light.

Pretty cool.  The trail continues up, a little rougher and sans steps, but this is it for me.  There are pretty flowers around, all white.

Time to go down.  Oh yeah.  This is not going to be fun.  Below are pictures of the trail going down – steps going to steps going to steps, as far as the eye can see.

As you have seen, I am flirting with bad weather on this hike; it has been threatening rain, and on the way down the rain lets loose over the valley, left image below.

I’ve got to make it to that parking lot before it beats me there, so I hurry on.  I make it with just a few raindrops encouraging my pace.  The last image shows the clouds settling in as daylight ends.  What a fun and unique hike!  And the ankle did fine.