New Zealand Vacation

Sunday, January 28:
Haast - Wanaka

Interesting side note: When I went to create the above map in Google Maps, instead of giving me the direct route shown, Google had me backtracking almost all the way back to Greymouth, crossing all the way over to the East Coast, turning back south to Palmerston, and then back west agan to Wanaka, a 12-hour trip of over 1,000 km. . When I tried to drag the route back to the direct route, it did so, but as soon as released the mouse button, the route reverted to that long detour. That puzzled me for a bit, until I noticed something. Before I released the mouse button, the short route was peppered with little red circles with a short horizontal white line in the center. OH! Although my journey took place in January and February of 2001, I am creating this post in the middle of July, 2022. It's the dead of winter in New Zealand. That road over the mountains is probably impassible due to snow at the moment! In order to force the short route, I had to specify a route with an intermediate destination: Makarora and then on to Wanaka.

Rosinante gamely carried us over Haast Pass: It was only mildly spectacular after the glacier area roads of the previous day. Mountain rivers ran down the clefts between peaks. There was a strange juxtaposition of Montana land-scape with tropical vegetation. Passed between two oddly beautiful, yet strange-ly unhealthy looking lakes of brilliant turquoise color (just by the Route 6 marker on the map above), and into Wanaka in time for lunch.

Wanaka is an uncrowded tourist resort. We arranged for an overnight stay, again through Backpackers’ at shared flat for $8.00 US / night. Sandwiches al fresco for dinner to '70s rock on the Muzak. Credence, Tom Petty, Van Morrison. Pop music here seems stuck in the '70's, or maybe they just had the local classic rock station on. Commercial radio is just as bad as in the US. The birds, even the imported species, seem remarkably unafraid of people. We watched a common sparrow unconcernedly mop up the crumbs left on a plate just across the table from us.

We stayed in a cottage shared with Malcolm & Pat Jones, an older couple from Wales. He at 72 and she at 68 had been spending the last couple of weeks cycling all around South Island on a couple of 1960 era 3-speed bikes.