Running away from the weather - Fox Glacier to Queenstown via Wanaka

Yesterday evening we made a decision to just leave the glaciers, and hopefully the rain, behind us and hurry on down to Queenstown. We were meant to stay at Fox glacier today and do a couple of hikes and viewpoints but seems relatively pointless as one, we can’t see beyond 20 metres and two, it would be truly miserable on any hike we attempted in this deluge. Therefore the drive today was a long one, about five hours in total and was mostly in pretty heavy rain.

We were driving though Wanaka, which was on our list of places to visit, in particular a hike and a tree. A tree that grows in Lake Wanaka. It’s rubbish, how they’ve created a tourist destination out of a lonely tree in a lake is a work of marketing genius by the Wanaka tourism board. Still, it drew us to Wanaka and we did have lunch overlooking the tree and the lake. And it was actually pretty nice. So it definitely worked on us and did actually break up the drive to Queenstown pretty nicely. 

Between Wanaka and Queenstown is a great portion of road where the sun finally made a glorious appearance and, when we crested the mountain range looking over Queenstown, the clouds parted to reveal the city before us. Truly stunning, and after days of dense fog a glorious experience. We just picked up some groceries and headed on over to the campground.

This evening we dined on delicious barbecued, minted lamb and we’ve booked onto a sunrise coach trip and cruise to Milford Sound tomorrow which takes 12 hours, so we’re up at 5am. It’s going to be an early night.