Wanaka, Queenstown, and Te Anau

A panorama of the view from the town of Wanaka. You can see a storm in the middle of the picture (click on it to enlarge).

As we drove away from the perpetually waterlogged West coast, the clouds and rain disappeared and we were treated to some fine summer weather. Our first stop was Wanaka, a small town nestled in what used to be a gold mining area. The gold rush in NZ occurred around the same time as the one in the States, and many towns just dried up when it was over. A few, like Queenstown, hung on and eventually came back to life via the tourist industry.

Wanaka is sort of up-and-coming as a tourist destination but still retains its small-town charm (Queenstown, while gorgeous, has been taken over by the tourists).

Amelia checking out some of the locals in Wanaka.

We spent two days relaxing in Wanaka and soaking up the scenery before making the short drive to Queenstown. Most people who visit NZ make a beeline for this place because it's located on the edge of a pristine lake surrounded by impressive mountains. It's the adventure capital of the country and it's where bungy jumping was invented. All day long you can hear the roar of jetboats and watch people parasailing. I'd recommend this spot to anyone visiting the country but we stuck to the less adventurous stuff because of the kids.

It was while we were in Queenstown that Quinn developed his still-present habit of helping to push the stroller. This slowed us down a bit, so we tried to carry him instead. He explained that this was a poor idea and we eventually explored the entire town like this:

Quinn literally walked about 2.5 miles like this before giving up.


Amelia and Amy posing with the founder of Queenstown. He was a gold miner and he must have liked sheep.


Quinn at the Queenstown botanical gardens.


Quinn posing with a really big tree at the botanical gardens.


By this point we had been on the road for a few weeks. It was fun watching the kids adapt to living in a van; they didn't seem to notice that anything was amiss. Amelia got quite creative and decided to make a tuba out of our water hose:




Quinn checking out the lake with the Remarkables (the local mountain range) in the background.


Me and the kids at the lake with the botanical gardens and the Remarkables behind us.

After Queenstown we headed towards Fijordland. As you may have gathered from the name, Fijordland is a big area in the southwest part of the South island which is made up of fijords. It's kind of weird looking at it on a map because there's only one road in the entire area, and no towns to speak of. When you finally make it into Fijordland you quickly understand why this is, but I'll save that for next time. Our last stop before heading into the wilds was a town called Te Anau. It's well known as the launching point for people heading into Fijordland, but it's beautiful in its own right. We camped that night at Lake Te Anau, watching storms blow across the other side of the lake. It was astounding being practically alone in such a setting.

Me and the kids playing with rocks at the edge of the lake.

Sunset at Lake Te Anau. Otherworldly.

The West Coast

Ask a Kiwi about the West Coast and inevitably you'll hear about what a wild place it is. The coast is isolated and beautiful with lots of steep mountains, but it's sparsely populated. I imagine this has something to do with the heaps of sandflies and the rather excessive amount of rain that falls there. OH MY GOD DOES IT RAIN. Some places average 25 feet of rain per year. This had me worried as we headed to the coast because I didn't want to be stuck in a van with two kids and a bunch of sandflies while it stormed all day long.

We stopped first in Hokitika, known around here as the center of the jade trade. Known as pounamu to the Maori, jade is a really hard stone valued by the Maori for its use in adze blades, jewelry, and weapons. Jade forms 60 miles below the Earth's surface because it requires a lot of pressure to form, so you only find it in places where plate tectonics are really going apeshit, i.e. New Zealand. It's very popular in jewelry around here and you'll see large boulders of the stuff in prominent places, where people touch it for luck. After checking out the local jade factories and street vendors, I found myself wishing I could find a local river with a good supply and go collect some myself. At the end of the day, my kids and I made a nice discovery: jade was lying around wherever lots of rocks could be found. We scrambled around a gravel parking lot that evening, the kids and me picking up dusty gray rocks and spitting on them to see if they were jade. It made quite a sight, but we found some good stuff.


We left Hokitika and headed south down the coast, driving along a rugged and beautiful rainforest-choked road. Our next stop was at the Franz-Joseph glacier. Let me back up a bit; the reason for all of the aforementioned rain is that the steep mountains cause the humidity in the air to condense. At the bottom of the mountains, this rains down and creates the rainforest. At the top of the mountains, huge snowfields form and thicken until the pressure forms a river of ice, a.k.a. a glacier. There are over a hundred glaciers in this part of the country, but only a few of them come all the way down to the rainforest (I've heard that this is the only place on Earth where you can find a glacier in the middle of the rainforest). You can't get too close to these bad boys because they'll kill you, as some hapless tourists found out about a week before we visited.

Amelia and me checking out the Franz-Joseph glacier.

Waterfalls lined the steep walls of the valley on the hike to the glacier.

Amy and the kids about a kilometer from the glacial terminus.

This was about as close as we got. The ill-fated tourists decided to walk right up to the face and Darwin intervened.

After our walk to the glaciers we traveled down the coast a bit further to a town called Haast. On the way we saw some great scenery; here's a picture from Knight Point:

I hope you enjoy this picture. I donated a pint of blood to the sandflies while taking it.

On the way we had to detour around a wee landslide:


After having a few days of fine weather, the heavens opened up. We therefore found outselves in Haast, stuck in a van with two kids and a bunch of sandflies while it stormed all day long.

After leaving Haast we headed back inland, through the Haast Pass. Though we were tired of being rained on by then, the scenery was still beautiful. Everywhere you looked, clouds covered massive mountains with waterfalls cascading down the sides.

Typical West Coast scenery.

Beech Forest, Haast Pass.

Blue Hole, Haast Pass. Gigantic trout teemed in these pools.

Forest, Hast Pass.

Up next: our jaunt in central Otago.