Days 31–33: Wanaka feat. Roys Peak
The lakes and mountains just get bigger and better
As we drove down to Wanaka, it was difficult to know where to look — for Anna, I mean, obviously my eyes were on the road the whole time. It was a pretty long drive from Fox Glacier, but the scenery made it fly by.
We started out on a coastal road, followed by a route through Mount Aspiring National Park, then onto the winding lakeside roads past Lake Wanaka, with the hills and mountains lit up by the late evening sun.
For the first time on our trip so far, we came across a free “service hub” for people travelling in campervans. An hour of WiFi, toilets, a dump station, and a hot shower, topped off with some friendly staff to introduce us to the area.
We arrived half an hour before it closed to find that there was a dozen-person queue for the showers! We stuck around with hopes of showering before it closed, and we just managed to get in as it turned eight o’clock.
From there, we went to the campsite and settled down for the night. We had a great view of the sun setting behind the mountains.
Because there was just so much to do in Wanaka, we decided to spend a couple of days there. The first day we used to see all of the sights, and the second day we went for a hike.
The first stop of the day was… not these really cute ducks:
It was this famous tree known as #ThatWanakaTree…
From there, we drove further round to the lake to Waterfall Creek. We didn’t really know what to expect for any of these stops as we were just following the suggestions of the visitor leaflet, but we were at least expecting to see a waterfall at this point. We didn’t. And we still don’t know why it’s called Waterfall Creek when it doesn’t have a waterfall.
It did redeem itself with nice views of Laka Wanaka, and Anna and I passed the time building rock towers.
Moving on once more, we came to Glendhu Bay. Just like everywhere else in Wanaka, it also had stunning views of the lake and mountains. We’d have been hard-pushed to find somewhere to look that wasn’t worthy of a postcard.
We also had our first sighting of another native bird known as a Silvereye — at least, we think we did. They were moving about way too fast for me to take a photo, but I’m sure that I saw the distinctive silver ring around their eyes at one point. You’ll have to click here to see for yourself what they look like.
Our final stop of the day was Diamond Lake. Again, our expectations and reality were two very different things. We were expecting that we might be able to go for a dip in some crystal-clear water. We didn’t. We actually just took a leisurely stroll around a — quite frankly — brownish lake. It was still very nice, but I’d hesitate to call it Diamond Lake if I was naming it.
We then enjoyed a late lunch back at Waterfall Creek — our rock towers hadn't lasted the test of time, unfortunately.
We made use of the service hub again that evening before heading back to the same campsite. We made sure to get the showers early to avoid the queue!
We had an early start the next day because we were hiking up to Roys Peak. It was a very different experience to the other hikes we’ve done because we weren’t walking through forest and bush; it was essentially just a zig-zagging track up a very big hill.
We were up when it was still dark out which is never fun, and we always moan about it, but it was well worth it once we got going. It was a nice temperature to walk in and we got to see the rabbits and birds that are out and about at that time in the early morning light.
We weren’t too sure what the walk itself was actually going to be like, but it started out as a fairly steep climb and stayed that way for the duration. We both think it was probably the most gruelling hike we’ve done solely for this reason.
Despite the fact that we weren’t walking through anything that interesting on the track itself, the benefit of it being in the open was that we had panoramic views the whole way up.
Roys Peak is one of the most popular hikes in New Zealand. It’s really easy to get to and the scenery from the top is stunning as you look down the length of Lake Wanaka and its islands.
One of the big attractions for people is the iconic photo that you can take from the lookout near the top. Unfortunately, it says a lot about our fellow Millenials when you hear stories as we did of people queuing for 2 hours(!) the day before to take that one specific photo for their Instagram account.
We eventually arrived at the lookout to find a queue of about a dozen people, all standing way back from the actual viewpoint while one person at a time went up and had their photo taken — many, many, times. They did their smile-facing-the-camera pose, facing-away-from-the-camera pose, facing-the-camera-with-your-arms-in-the-air pose, facing-away-from-the-camera-with-your-arms-in-the-air pose, sitting-down-facing-the-camera pose, sitting-down-facing-away-from-the-camera pose, sitting-sideways pose, about ten different yoga poses, and the list goes on. It was very painful to watch. The funny thing is that the people were standing so far away from the camera that it could literally have been anyone holding their leg in the air on the edge of the lookout.
Neither Anna nor I could be bothered to wait in the cold breeze for long so after a few minutes of waiting, I decided enough was enough.
I said something like “We don’t actually have to stand around waiting for everyone, we can all just go over to the lookout and take our photos from there?” I think this scared everyone a little bit because it received some nervous laughs — I’ve got my mum’s side of the family to thank for that. Nobody was happy waiting for anyone else to take their hundred photos, but they were also torn because they wanted to take a hundred photos themselves.
Me speaking up prompted an American girl to pipe up. She was a self-proclaimed impatient person and said that we should impose a two-pose rule or a one-minute rule. She then proceeded to bitch about the girls who were currently down the end taking photos so she didn’t really help the cause that much because everyone instantly disliked her.
It turned out that my not-so-gentle nudge was enough and everyone begrudgingly agreed to at least not take the photos from a mile away. We all marched down to the lookout and things went a lot more quickly from then on. It didn’t really matter either way because Anna and I had a plan to just walk down the end and ignore the queue if it continued for any longer. We’re such badasses.
We were in and out pretty swiftly with our photos; none of the cliche ones for us! The funny thing was that the girl that nobody liked ended up taking ages herself and got her friend to take photos from really far away again! Some people. I thought this was an all-around dick move after her comments before so when she came back up to the top, I said, “What happened to that one-minute rule you mentioned?” This got a few chuckles from some of the others but she was quick to point out that, “Technically, I think I was actually less than a minute.” She wasn’t.
I’m not sure which specific technicality of the laws of nature she was referring to that allowed her to claim that five minutes was less than one minute, but I kept that to myself. I’d amused myself enough for one day.
With that slightly annoying part of the hike over, we made quick progress getting back down to the bottom again. Our feet were definitely glad to make it back to the van.
