...Oh have you have you seen Wanaka? Wanaka the beauty's astounding! (Now go back and sing that to the tune of
lydia the tattooed lady) So the next part of my trip after Franz Josef was my stop in Wanaka, and probably my favorite part.
I didn't really want to spend my entire trip coasting through hostels, because of the expenses, and you don't really make many friends in hostel on your own. My solution to this was that I joined this site called couchsurfing which hooks travelers up with people who're willing to host you in the city you're traveling to. I tried to get a whole bunch of couchsurfing spots set up, but the only person who replied was this really cool guy named Keith in Wanaka. He said he could host me, and had another surfing that'd be staying with him at the same time so we could hang out. After I bussed into Wanaka, about 7pm, Keith picked me and the other surfer Mary Ann, up and he made us dinner. Keith was this really cool typical laid back Kiwi guy. He's really into sports and music, and actually makes his living as a snowboard/ski instructor. He spends half of his year in Japan, in the Hokkaido region (the northern most island) teaching snowboard, and train instructors there, then he spends the other half in Wanaka where there's a pretty big snow resort there in the winter. He had a whole bunch of really interesting stories, having traveled and worked around most of the world as a snowboard instructor, and even wrote the "Lonely Planet" version of places to snowboard/ski in Japan. When I had got there it was only the 2 week he'd been home from Japan, so I was really fortunate that he was able to host me! Mary Ann was really cool too. She'd just finished a linguistic degree in France (she's French, alors j'ai parle un peu avec elle), and came to do an internship here in New Zealand. She was working with college aged kids up in Auckland (that's middle school age in the States), and was doing the same thing I was: traveling for the Easter Holidays. She was really into mountaineering, but had messed up her ankle a week or so ago so she couldn't do any strenuous hikes. Since I was still nursing my gimpy knee, I didn't mind too much.
The first night we were there we mainly just sat up and talked, and
Keith gave us some ideas about what we could do around Wanaka. He
offered to take us up Mt Iron the next morning, so we agreed and that
was that. Mt. Iron isn't really a strenuous hike; it's a kind of
foothill a little ways from the lake, but the views you get from the top
are spectacular! It's literally 360 degrees of mountains all around
you, and lakes. It didn't hurt that fall was just starting to grab hold
of the area, so all the trees were just starting to change. There were
tons of beautiful yellows, oranges, and reds just bursting into color
in the landscape.
Another view of Wellington and its amazing countryside!! So this will just be a short-ish post, because there's only so many times I can describe hiking through the amazing scenery around New Zealand in detail. So on the 5th of May a group of Massey International students went on a hike on the opposite side of Wellington from Mt. Vic. It was pretty awesome because it was one of those spots that I could see from a distance and always said "I want to hike that," and lo-and-behold that's where we were going.
And now on to the final installment of my Easter Break adventures
(nearly a month later, I fail at updating my blog!). So I arrived in
Queenstown on a Saturday evening so I didn't get to do much besides grab
some dinner and pass out in my hostel from exhaustion. The real fun
started on Sunday. I figured, since I had four days in Queenstown, I
could take my time adventuring so I got up late and wandered up a path
marked for Queenstown Hill. It's just a foothill that looks out over
Queenstown and lake Wakatipu, but boy is the view awesome. It's not a horrible horrible hike, but some of the uphills are kind of hard. It was another one of those hikes where I started walking up and thought I got to the top...and then kept going up....and up...and up. It follows a path through a pine forest until it clears to just grasses and scrub brush. The forest path got tough at times because it was covered in pine needles so sometimes it was really slippery. There was, however, an actual designated path for once! There were some cool informational kind of signs that had what the town was founded on, some Maori legends, and different bird species in the area on them.
