Wanaka - Hiking and Biking

We took two days to rest in Te Anau before we moved on. 

This was good for us, but especially for the kids. They explored all the playgrounds, rode on peddle carts around the RV holiday park, and made friends with some Malaysian kids from Singapore. 

Then we drove about 3 hours to Wanaka. I had some rather active things planned here. 

The first one was to hike Roy’s Peak. It is a 16 km hike that takes around 5-7 hours. It was described as hard, but other kids have done it. The photos looked amazing, and I wanted to try. 

The day we arrived was stunning! Bright, clear, and very little wind, so I said that if there was room in the parking lot (it’s very popular), then we should try to do it. 

Luck was with us! A campervan just like ours was leaving as we arrived. So we parked, ate some lunch, did all the sunscreen and gathering sun hats/sunglasses, and we set off at 2 pm. Now I knew we had to check into our holiday park by 8 pm that night, but that still gave us six hours for the hike. We should be good, right?! 

Yeah, no. 

In the first ten minutes, which was a very steep treeless and dusty uphill, I nearly had a mutiny on my hands. One of my kids panted past me, muttering, “I can’t. I can’t.” I said “oh, yes you can. It’s just walking.” It would be something I would say often on the way up, up, up the steep switchbacks for the next two and a half hours. 

The views were beautiful throughout the hike: lakes down below, distant mountains, near mountains, and even nearer sheep who baaaed us along as we trudged our sweaty and tired bodies past them.

However, with only 30 minutes left to our turn around deadline, I could tell we were still about an hour from the top. The kids had done their best, but this was arguably the hardest hike we had ever attempted together as a family. I’m confident they would have made it with more stops to rest… but we simply ran out of time. 

So, with one last sad look at the top, where I could just see people walking, we turned around and began our descent. Sigh…

This is our partial summit.

Going down actually was the hardest part for me. So while the kids and Tom were bounding down the hill, my knees said, “no bounding for you!” So I made it back, but was nearly hobbling by the end. It might be time for me to get some hiking poles. 

While we were a bit tired and demoralized from not finishing the hike, that all vanished when we arrived at our holiday park. There we found the Malaysian/Singapore friends the kids met in Te Anau were also staying at our same campsite!

The next day we were at it again, but instead of hiking we rented e-bikes and did a 30 km route from Lake Hawea back to Lake Wanaka. It was so beautiful. I don’t have many photos of this because …. biking.

While this was my first time on an e-bike, it certainly won’t be my last! So. Much. Easier!! Not any easier on my tailbone, but getting up hills made me feel like a biking beast.

It was a glorious ride by blue lakes, snow-capped mountains, over bridges and past a dam where when they release water, surfers come to practice. We went through a town and then alongside a gorgeous river, where we could see people kayaking and white-water rafting. We roamed through mountain bike trails until we reached Lake Wanaka on this glorious 80 degree day. 

This was the end of our bike ride.

We spent the of the rest of the day just hanging by the lake. 

Note: Kiwis (New Zealanders) are some hardy people. That water was icy. But despite that, there were so many people getting into it. And not like a polar plunge dip. They were going in and then lounging all the way in the water for a long time, like it was a warm bath or something. We saw this in the far south too. I would be in three layers and even wearing a hat and gloves and there were gals in bikinis splashing about in the sea.