Queenstown Area
After two weeks of traveling from township to township Queenstown feels like a beehive of people. It is ground zero for NZ’s adventure tourism. Hang gliding, skydiving, ski resorts, rafting, via ferrata, jet boats, canyon adventures — you name it, they charge for it. The prices the inflated. The outdoors stores are way too common and parking is expensive and difficult to find. Still, it was an enjoyable change of pace. The number of dining options and outdoors stores were neck and neck and I was tempted to spend the day bouncing from one $20 meal to the next but I eventually got myself out of the hustle and bustle and onto a neighboring trail.
Queenstown surprisingly also has a Ben Lomond Park but that was another full day up a mountain and I wasn’t up for it. I was also warned against driving the extra hour up to an outpost town at the top of the lake called Glenorchy. It is the other side of the Routeburn trail and has a few other little day tracks to take advantage of when the weather is good, which it wasn’t going to be. I settled on a short walk around Moke Lake and an early night at the DOC site. I was worried about the possibility of more gale force winds but the camp warden, a burly but gentle and warm spirited man, who introduced himself as Bear, told me not to worry. This wasn’t going to be like the winds we experienced when my solar panel almost came off. He told me that those winds swept even him off his feet and rolled him down the hill like a barrel.
Despite Queenstown’s busy nature, you can see it all in an afternoon so I figured I would drive myself out to Wanaka, the starting point to Mt. Aspiring National Park. More glaciers! My mom is joining me at the end of the week and we are going to drive up the west coast together so I can’t go too far away from Queenstown but I figured I could get in the last of my long hikes before we drop the pace significantly.
Personally, I found Wanaka to be absolutely charming. The layout and vibe is much better than Queenstown and their campsites don’t charge double for single campers. I have come to greatly appreciate the fact that prices in New Zealand are fairly standard. Campsites are typically always $20 per person per night everywhere you go, except Queenstown where it jumps up to $55/night for me to sleep in an unpowered van site. Fat chance. Wanaka’s main street of restaurants, cafes, and information centers is flanked on two sides with a long well manicured park, an equally long beach, and free parking for all.
Before heading to the campsite for the night, I managed to squeeze in 4.5 mile Diamond Lake and Rocky Mountain Peak Summit hike to get my first view of the countryside and a hint of glacier in the background. I deviated from the regular peace and quiet that I normally limit myself to on the trails and turned on a podcast. The time passed so much faster and I found it to be a great way to prevent my mind from wandering.
At the campsite the next morning I met another solo traveler, Max. Max is a recent graduate and a triathlete from France who just finished a biking tour across the country. His tour book was far better than mine and my mode of transportation was far more convenient so we teamed up for the next two days. We took a walk up to Iron Mountain, the city’s local high point.
On the way back down we stumbled across the Puzzling World. This is one of those odd ball museums that capitalized on optical illusions, puzzles, and mind bender exhibits. We spent at least two hours wandering through the halls and the full sized labyrinth outside. By the time we finished the easy version of the maze, get to all four corners in any order, we were hungry and sluggish.
So we took our pack lunches down to the waterfront and had ourselves a picnic on the beach. It was so pleasant and relaxing. We wanted to continue the cool vibe but lunch only lasts for a few minutes and we wanted to keep moving so we decided to take the lakeside trail which basically weaves around the whole city and suburb. It turned out to be a much longer walk than I anticipated but casual and easy. There is a large suburb with hundreds of individually architected holiday houses. We window shopped for our favorite designs and admired the panoramic windows and immaculate yard spaces. The walked looked something like this:
Some four hours later we found our way back to downtown and took ourselves out to see the movie Red Sparrow. Cinema Paradiso is a uniquely cozy movie house. We ordered pizza, spectacularly good quality handmade pizza, and at intermission time we doubled down and got both the freshly baked chocolate cookie and the ice cream. The movie theater had giant cushy leather seats or couches, depending on your preference, and there was even a little car in the front row for those who wanted to pretend like it was a drive-in. For both of us, it was the first time in a long time, perhaps the whole trip, that we were able to relax with a full stomach in a warm cushy chair with desert for an extended period of time. The next day we couldn’t help but recount, multiple times, how nice the experience was.
Especially given that the next day we were hiking up Roy’s Peak, a brutal 16 km (10 mi.), 1,000 meter (3,300 ft.) hike straight up the mountain. This hike was brutal in so many ways. For example, in many cases mountain hikes start with trees, or they meander a little bit before they start their incline. Not this track. It’s open faced all the way and starts out with switchbacks that NEVER end! Never. This track puts Mission Peak into the category of child’s play. 2/3rds of the way up is a popular Instagram point and we did our part and took a lunch break. I tried to get a picture from the very top but the car park looked like a speck and the bottom half of the trail was invisible. I never thought I would suffer from walking downhill but I spent the last hour or so imaging if I could fly or roll down in a barrel or a shopping cart or become a hedgehog.
When we finally got off the mountain we took ourselves straight to one of the more private beaches that we discovered in the prior day’s walk and soaked our muscles in the icy water. I popped open two beers, one for myself and one on his behalf, and a chocolate bar and we sunbathed until sunset.
Unfortunately the next three days were riddled with more severe storm warnings. Hiking through the Haast Valley was not going to be a rewarding experience and poor Max was going to have to bike back over the hill to catch his plane in Queenstown the next day. It pained me to imagine him biking for 6 hours after the Roy’s Peak hike so I opted to drive him back. We stopped at a fancy distillery and admired the artwork of a Jessica Nielson. She is a breast cancer survivor who somehow managed to inspire a crowd-sourced fence of 500+ bras.
The next three days were spent laying low, enjoying coffee shops, making reservations and catching up on my writing. I treated myself to a day at the community pool — lane swimming, hot showers, and a huge hot tub. It started to reach freezing temperatures at night and with the constant rain I griped over the long walks to the bathroom or kitchen. Even the van felt the cold. I had to take it into a mechanic for a loose fan belt which was causing the it to squeal in the mornings. Karma must have been on my side though. It only cost me $25 to fix rather than the $250 that I was originally quoted. In the same day my mom escaped the bad east coast weather just before her flight was cancelled. Denis got approved for the time off to come visit and with the cold also came the snow capped mountain tops. Maybe this bout of bad weather will add a little sparkle to our drive up the coast.