Wanaka Wonderland

Wanaka doesn't seem to be a place where too many other visitors have heard about, so most continue on the bus, despite the jaw dropping drive in via the Hawea and Wanaka lakes. It seems it also makes it into Time's top ten Dream Destinations. Grand ice covered mountains shooting out of these big lakes its easy to see how this is one of the main adventure capitals of NZ (although apparently an unknown one). The town buildings are all quite new with very pleasing architecture, with construction mostly of the wood and stone type. Everything here has an ultra fresh feel and super tidy and clean like the air.



On the way in I sit up front near our driver Cameron. It turns out this is his favourite town. He's a bit of an adventure man himself it seems. It turns out he had his paraglider packed in the bus too!

It looks expensive here and it probably is. Front page news story lists Wanaka as the 2nd most expensive place to live in NZ. That seemed to be confirmed when I went looking for a bike. Where I might normally go and pick up something quite basic from a department store for around $70, the cheapest I could find here was $900. Fortunately after checking myself out of Purple Cow because the internet was of the $6/hr variety, I checked into Matterhorn where I can use IAC (they have hotspots at most backpackers, motels, resorts etc) on their $40/mth system. Here, the relief manager sold me one of his bikes for $50 (around here it costs $20/half day to rent one - you can rent a car for that!) Matterhorn seems good. It's one of those smaller house type backpackers where there's only about 6-7 people here and $20/night. Purple Cow was very ritzy, but just a bit too big for my liking... well and the internet was going to run me broke and it didn't work on wireless anyway and I think its called Purple Cow after the receptionist.. not sure if it's part of the act there (it was certainly consistent).. but I think if there was a quiz on why the place is called Purple Cow, I reckon she'd rank high on the list.

I haven't decided yet if I'll stay here until winter or just scope out the place for a week while the weather isn't looking too flash for the best part of a week. That will suit me fine while my toe fixes itself up.

The picture above the map of South Island is how it looks from Purple Cow. It's not quite that close to the lake shore, but the picture came out better with a quick walk across the open grass area in front of it.

By the way.. the best naming convention I've heard yet of renaming the islands instead of south and north is to rename them Hundreds and Thousands because of the relatively fewer numbers that live in the south island. Not sure if it will make it into any official maps though.

Here's an overview video from Lake Wanaka Tourism