Kiwi Land, Part V

Location: Base hostel, Wanaka

Date: 28 May 2012

Time: 4:00 PM

Well, the weather was bad again.  So no glacier heli-hike.  I’m disappointed because it was one of the things I was really looking forward to about New Zealand, but it just means I’ll have an excuse to come back.  Plus, the significant sum of money I saved will let me do some other cool activities in Queenstown.

We stopped a ton on the way to Wanaka.  The roads are still incredible, surrounded on both sides by huge snow-capped mountains that were carved by glaciers and deep blue lakes in between.  Whales stopped a bunch of times for great photo ops.

The first stop was Fox Glacier, which is the next most famous glacier other than Franz Josef.  The weather was still crap, so we just snapped a few photos and I walked a couple hundred yards towards the bottom, but we didn’t actually go on the ice.  Like I said, I’ll have to come back for a glacier experience (or maybe try Alaska, also high on my list).

Fox Glacier, not at its best

The Tasman Sea, that is

One of the coolest stops was the Blue Pools walk.  You walk about ten minutes into the forest to a sort of ravine, and then you cross a couple shaky wire bridges.  The water in the river below is aqua blue.  Apparently the bits of sediment that come from the glacial melt give it that color.  There was a trio of jet boaters below; that’s something I might try.

En route to Blue Pools 

Just a shaky bridge over the blue water 

20 person maximum? 

That's why they call it blue pools. 

I kept saying on all my trips in Australia that they were the most beautiful places I’d ever been.  Well, now that’s all changed.  New Zealand is, and will be for a very long time, the most spectacularly beautiful place I’ve ever been.  Every vista is breathtaking.  This is nature at its best.  Pictures don’t do it justice, because the feeling of being surrounded by these mountains and lakes and glaciers and rainforests is indescribable.  I think every person in the world owes it to himself to come here.

We took a group picture at one lake, and then went to another, Lake Hawea, which is enormous and supposedly over 450 meters deep.  As usual, the water is clean and blue (and probably ice cold).

Our group (Whales is taking the photo)

Yet more glacial lakes

Deep glacial lakes

Now we’re at the Base hostel in Wanaka.  I’m going to cook myself dinner and then head to the pub for a bit for Karaoke and pool.  We’re on roughly the same timetable as a couple other bus groups, so there is a fair amount of people at this hostel.  Should be a good time.  Tomorrow we have the morning to explore Wanaka, which is at the southern tip of a lake surrounded by (you guessed it) mountains, and then we head down to Queenstown, “the adventure capital of the world,” where the next leg of my journey begins.