Wanaka to Queenstown

On leaving Kakanui, we did a little shopping in Oamaru and meandered our way west once again to the little lakeside town of Wanaka in the Southern Alps. We have a week off before we need to be in Putaruru on the North Island.

Sunday dawned beautiful and sunny. We had looked up the location of the local Presbyterian church the night before and decided to go. A good decision. It was a moderate sized church with many windows looking out to the surrounding mountains.  The service spoke to us in many ways and gave us things to talk about: a brief smile on my part as the minister reminded us all that “we are now in the season of Lint”; a new hymn to us based on the well known Ecclesiastes passage with lines that read “A time to be saving, a time to spend”; new words to an old hymn, “God who sets us on a journey to discover, dream, and grow…”

From church we drove out of town on the “highest road” in New Zealand, the road from Wanaka to Queenstown. Along the way, we stopped at the Cardrona Hotel, a NZ icon featured in a favorite old Speights’ beer ad. Built in the 1860s during the gold rush, it is now a frequent tourist stop for refreshments of various kinds. We had a hearty tomato and ginger soup before heading up and up.

At the summit, we did an hour’s walk higher up to Rock’s Peak and panoramic views of the entire area--Queenstown, Lake Wakatipu, plus the Remarkables, Crown, Carrick, and Criffle mountains. Don’t ask me which was which! The surrounding hills were covered in tussocks of light olive green grasses. From a distance, it looked like textured velvet or a knubby sweater that begged to be touched. Back to the car, we descended into Queenstown traversing at one point 6-7 hairpin switchback turns before getting out of the mountains.

Queenstown is a very large tourist haven. Sadly, at this point, I was driving and got completely rattled and, I must confess, very crabby. We finally slid into a 30 minute parking place in a very congested downtown area, got a snack, found a bathroom, and walked the short blocks to the gorgeous sparkling waterfront. We either had to find a new parking place or head on home--we headed home but by a different route.

We ended up stumbling on Kawarau Bridge, the site of AJ Hackett’s original local bungy jump back in the 80‘s. Hackett was an entrepreneur who popularized bungy jumping and is considered the father of the extreme sport. It was a large commercial center so we stayed and watched several people jump. Watching at that site was free unlike some other sites. It was a 142 foot drop (you can be dipped in the water or not as you wish). A whole busload of Asian tourists were indulging. (I found fascinating that there was a list of instructions in the bathroom in about six different Asian character languages--obviously, this is a destination spot for Asian tourists!)

Back on the road, we felt like we had been transported to Eastern Washington. There were miles of vineyards, winery after winery, and fruit stand after fruit stand in a valley along a river ringed by dry hillsides. We treated ourselves to a large bag of fresh picked crackling good cherries and a box of cute little green and pink plums called greengages which turned out to be very sweet.