Sunday 15 March 2026 – You can do all sorts of things from Wānaka – boat tours on the lake, rafting, helicopter flights, waterfall cable climbs, sky diving, paragliding. It seems such a nice town, yet everything seems to be geared towards getting you out of it. Anyway, another option is to find a trail and go walking. So, with a day on our hands, that’s what we decided to do. Obviously.
Caroline looked us over and said that we looked like the hiking types (appearances can be so deceptive), so why didn’t we try the Rob Roy Glacier trail? We took a look at it: 472m gain in 5km, according to AllTrails, is a little on the daunting side, but we decided we’d give it a go. It’s not local to Wānaka; it’s a 50km drive into the Mount Aspiring National Park, and some 30km of that is along a dirt road.
As we left Wānaka, the extent and scope of the A&P show was somewhat borne in on us, even though they were breaking down and clearing up.
Soon we could see the snow-capped mountains in the distance
and eventually hit the dirt road.
The scenery, as you’d expect from heading into the mountains, was dramatic
and so were the driving conditions, occasionally.
The sheep were loose, but there were also herds of deer behind fences, presumably being farmed. We got to the car park to find, to our total lack of surprise, that on a sunny Sunday, lots of other people had had the same idea as us.
We managed to find a space that didn’t seem too obstructive (later, we found that people had strewn cars all along the road, so we needn’t have worried about being tidy after all). A quick visit to the loo there and off we went,
past a rather handsome sculpture of a raptor of some description.
(It’s got a rather Simpsons-narrow-eyed expression, don’t you think?). The path starts off not completely level but at least “Inca flat” – ending at the same altitude it started – beside the Matukituki river
before one crosses the suspension bridge and the path starts to climb.
It’s largely through forest, which means that the bloody trees get in the way of the view
but occasionally they clear to give one a decent view.
Most of the trail is fine, if a little rocky, but there are some interesting moments as you climb.
and then you get to some steps – 126 of them in total.
These are relatively recent additions, to bypass damage that had rendered the trail impassable, so I suppose I’ll let them off. Shortly after the steps, you reach the Lower Lookout, where there are benches and an opportunity to rest and get some idea of what awaits those who carry on to the Upper Lookout.
From the signs and the AllTrails track profile, I was expecting this last kilometre to be rather tougher than what we’d already climbed, but basically it wasn’t. There were a couple of spots where the track became what Ian Burley would describe as “technical” and which I would call “bloody tricky and a bit nerve-racking”.
but we negotiated them without injury and carried on, past a couple of decent views
to
the end of the trail – unofficial caption: “Thank Christ for that!”. Apart from the sheer satisfaction of having grunted one’s way up there, it’s a great place to get to. For a start, you can sit down and have your lunch,
and read the various info boards about the history of the place, which completely fail to answer the one obvious question that must occur to everyone as they heave themselves up the trail: why the actual is it called the “Rob Roy Glacier Trail”? What has a Scottish outlaw from the 17th Century got to do with an ice field in New Zealand? The glacier is named after the mountain, Rob Roy Peak; the naming of the mountain is usually attributed to one Charlie Douglas, a late 19th-century explorer with strong Scottish connections. There seem to be many Scottish aspects to this region of New Zealand, and this is a classic example.
Anyway….the view is fantastic.
It’s of course very difficult to do justice to photographically; I also tried a bit of video from this lookout and a point slightly below it.
I hope you get the idea.
Having lunched, of course, we had to face the inevitability of getting back down again; down can be so much harder than up. Actually, it was OK, with a couple of decent views as we went,
but we were glad to see the suspension bridge and the car park again.
Unsurprisingly, there were far fewer vehicles there when we got back to our car.
According to my Garmin, the trail was 11km, and I expended 1300 calories in 16,000 steps. This makes it half a Tongariro, without the utter fucking brutality of That Descent, so we felt pretty good having completed today’s hike in just four and a half hours..
The journey back to our accommodation was as scenic as the journey out,
and we spent the rest of the evening resting.
This was our only full day in Wānaka – the morrow would see us moving on to parts new and even further south on our journey to the bottom of the South Island, via a couple of potentially interesting places – stay tuned to find out which.
Thursday 12 March 2026 – We didn’t fancy kayaking or paying to join the organised hike from the Lodge, but we had time on our hands, and felt we should go for a walk. Obviously. Showers were (accurately) forecast for the morning, but later on in the day we embarked on a walk to Monro Beach, some 3km to the north of the Lodge and reached along a public path. This is a rainforest walk, through some more rainforesty rainforest. The path starts out quite wide,
crosses a suspension bridge
View from the suspension bridge
and then becomes rather narrower as it wends its way through the forest.
There are some impressively tall trees
but apart from that, it’s just this rainforest path, you know?
It’s pleasant to be out and walking in all that greenery, but frankly, once you’ve seen one rainforest, unless you’re rather better versed than I am in the lore of the rainforest, you’ve seen ’em all, so there was little to remark upon. We reached the beach
and Jane started scouting around to try to find some greenstone. It’s a stony beach so there’s plenty of scope for fossicking. I’m not hugely into that, so I took some photos of the environs. There are some moderately dramatic rocks out to sea
and a colourful jumble of them on land
and it seems that the beach is not unpopular as a walking destination;
possibly because the weather had cheered up since the morning there were a few couples walking the path at the same time as us.
We got back to the Lodge with time for a Nice Cup Of (Twinings finest Earl Grey) Tea before going out on the Lodge’s daily 5pm pre-drinkies walk. This time we were guided by Kirsten, who took us along a path to the lake, via a few notable plants and trees. Fringing the Lodge’s grounds are some very old trees
and Kirsten showed us a few more as we walked the short distance to the lake shore.
As before, fantails and tomtits accompanied us at times, seeking the insects we disturbed. I only had the little Sony camera with me, but managed to capture this shot of a tomtit.
I’m not sure whether the bird is feeling sad or is simply fed up that we haven’t disturbed more insects for it.
Kirsten showed us a couple of locations that could possibly come into their own after dark: one was a Lemonwood tree, which is a favoured perching spot of Morepork owls; and the other was the bole of a fallen tree which is known to harbour glow worms. So, after (another very fine) dinner, we pottered out with torches to see what we could see. Not, sadly, owls; but we found our way back to the glow worm tree and
there they were! Since we were not pressed for time, we experimented a bit with photography of this tricky subject. The photo above was simply captured using Night Mode on a Samsung phone, but I had the Nikon with me and had a go with that, too.
Not a huge difference, to be honest. We tried with a little bit of light
which give a slightly better idea, although the light does overwhelm the glow from the worms; and one with a little less light,
where, if you use your imagination, you might be able to see a little bit of the tree (lower left) as well as the glows. Finally, before we left the poor things in peace, we used the torch to illuminate one;
you can see the sticky threads it has exuded to trap insects attracted by its glow.
That was it for the day, so we retired to sleep the sleep of the just been out for a walk, wondering how much of the following day would be usable for touristing, because the weather forecast was pretty dire.
Friday 13 March 2026 – Forecast:
Reality:
We were, then, reasonably confident that the morning was a write off. However, it was (a) nice to bunk off and take things easy from relentless touristing and (b) a good opportunity to catch up with the laundry, as These Things Are Important, You Know.
However, the forecast was for the day to improve and the rain duly stopped, so, having exhausted all the hikes near the Lodge, we didn’t go for a walk. Obviously. We took up on a slightly left-field recommendation from Donovan, one of the serving staff at the Lodge, and headed out towards Jackson Bay. There’s nothing there apart from a famous fish and chip shop and it would be too late for lunch by the time we got there and anyway we’re eating too much as it is; but we thought it might make a nice excursion – it’s about 65km south of the Lodge.
The route takes one near the small township of Haast which features a petrol station and a coffee shop called the Striker Cafe.
This was only open until 2.30pm and we got there only just in time for a coffee. So we also treated ourselves to cake, which was lovely but which we might, of course, come to regret: “sin in Haast, repent at leisure”. Then we carried on along the coast road to Jackson Bay, which led past some pretty varied scenery.
One stretch of arrow-straight road led through rainforest, which felt distinctly weird.
One thing Jane had spotted en route was a Pioneers Cemetery, so we stopped off to take a look.
Several graves were dotted throughout the woodland, some with headstones, many without.
It was a sight to cause mixed emotions: sadness because it seems a rather lonely and neglected site; but a certain warmth that the contribution of the pioneers to the generation of the area is recognised via a heritage location.
So: Jackson Bay, then. Indeed a small place. It has a wharf, from which Jane hoped to see perhaps penguins or maybe dolphins but didn’t.
The wharf is perhaps not being best maintained.
it has a handful of buildings,
chief among which is The Craypot, the fish’n’chips place recommended by Donovan.
It may not look much, but it seems like it’s a destination restaurant; lots of locals we talked to knew about it. Outside the Craypot is a rather fetching installation featuring many, many abalone shells (the locals call them pāua).
Jane had a quick chat with the owner, who said that he and his family had eaten all of the shells’ inhabitants over the years, having fished for them where they used to live further south. Abalone fishing is currently forbidden in Jackson Bay in order for the population to regenerate; the sustainability of fishing generally is taken quite seriously,
but I take issue with some of their guidelines.
I can’t even run at 9kph for any distance at all, far less walk at that speed.
The road from Haast to Jackson Bay features a few speed restrictions for roadworks, and it’s clear that rockfalls have been a problem.
Also, some of the scenery is markedly different from the rainforest flora we’d seen thus far in these parts.
On the way back to the Lodge, we made a couple of stops in the hope that there was some more scenery to take in. The first was also so that I could indulge in schoolboy giggles.
Actually, this site was a pleasant stop, apart from sandflies, which were occasionally a bit of a nuisance. There’s a lake there, Dune Lake, which we could have walked around had not evening drinks back at the Lodge been making their siren call, but we walked a little of it
to a viewpoint, which has a great outlook on more of that unfamiliar vegetation we’d seen earlier.
There’s also a small marine reserve, Tauparikaka Marine reserve, which is an attractive setting.
The other stopping place was Knight’s Point Lookout, which offers, I suppose, a decent enough view
but has a surprisingly large car park for what it offers, with multiple bus parking and camper van slots. I guess the presence of public toilets might have something to do with it, because it’s otherwise just this decent view.
Back at the Lodge, we had our final, again very fine, dinner as the sun (which by now had made an appearance) set over the excellent view from the dining room.
These will be our final images from the Wilderness Lodge at Lake Moeraki. Tomorrow, we move on, again further south, and the pace of events picks up somewhat – no more three-night stays as we make our way down to and round the south coast. We have just over a week left in this lovely country and, we hope, lots more to see and enjoy, so stay with us for the rest of the trip, won’t you?
Tuesday 10 March 2026 – Our short time in Hokitika was pretty damp, and these photos tell you all you need to know about the short drive as we continued down to our next stop, the little town of Franz Josef.
Franz Josef, apart from being the Christian names of Haydn, the famous composer of classical music and inventor of the string quartet, is the name of a famous glacier (so famous that even I had heard of it) and also of the Austrian Emperor Franz Josef I. That the glacier be named after the Emperor was the idea in 1865 of German geologist Julius (or possible Johann, depending on which AI overview you believe) von Haast, who generously gave his own name to a town a little further down the coast. Haast also proposed a name for the neighbouring glacier, the Fox Glacier, so it’s definitely not named after Samantha Fox (Google her name unless you’re in the office). No, the Fox Glacier is named for Sir William Fox, a New Zealand Prime Minister (as opposed to the 14th century MP for York). Some of you might be familiar with Fox’s Glacier Mints and thus beginning to wonder if there’s a connection here, but no; the mints were originally named, by company founder Richard Fox, “Acme Clear Mint Fingers” which may have tripped off an Edwardian tongue but doesn’t really inspire; however his son’s wife suggested the family name plus “Glacier Mints”, thus creating the name we now know and love.
I’m glad I sorted that out for you.
Our accommodation in Franz Josef was the Legacy Te Waonui, which is a little piece of rainforest just on the edge of town.
View from our balcony
I was a bit surprised to find rainforest where I’d expected something a bit more, well, alpine, somehow. We looked around for some mountains
but couldn’t actually see any. What we could see is that the town is tiny, consisting basically of two streets, one of which is composed entirely of accommodation and the other, the main street, is bars, restaurants, a shop and at least half a dozen organisations offering helicopter rides of some sort or another (hence The Road To Heli). We had come for the chopper, as opposed to the chopper coming for us, as the nursery rhyme might have it.
We discovered the above as we’d had some time on our hands, so we’d gone for a walk. Obviously. At the southern edge of the town is the charming little church of Our Lady of the Alps
just outside which we caught, in the distance, a brief sight of a bird that Jane wanted to see,
but this was the best that the photo technology to hand could do. More on this later. We got a slightly higher-quality view of another bird whose call fills the air in these parts,
So the mainstream of this exposition – helicopter rides. We had two booked, the first one being a scenic ride, the second a heli-hike. Having seen the weather and its concomitant lack of visibility, we weren’t very sure that these would go ahead, but the morning of our first ride dawned a little clearer (i.e. one could see that there really were mountains hereabouts),
and so we were reasonably sanguine about the chances. We checked in at Glacier Helicopters, which is where our itinerary told us to, and they kindly pointed us at their other office, the Helicopter Line, further down the street, where it was confirmed that (a) they were ready for us and (b) there would be a flight. After checking in and watching the prerequisite safety briefing, we walked out to the helipad across the street to find our copter
and Richard, its pilot. There were six people crammed in for our flight and Jane and I were lucky enough to get a front seat, which definitely gave us the best view of proceedings. As we took off, I was still wondering about how good the actual visibility would be
but Richard clearly knew the way and our glacier gradually became visible.
We flew up the glacier
and touched down near a stick which someone had helpfully stuck in the ice to indicate a landing spot.
We were able to get out and walk around for a few minutes, only ducking slightly when another chopper whizzed by
and got a good eyeful of the plateau at the top of the glacier.
We clambered back in to the helicopter and Richard gave us a tour of the neighbourhood
including the Fox Glacier
as well as other, smaller glaciers that flow into or from the same bowl
before we headed back down to Franz Josef
amid increasing cloud. We learned that ours was the last flight to get away that morning, so, as ever, we’d been lucky with the weather. Not perfectly so: the flight was billed as a “Mount Cook Spectacular” and Mount Cook was hidden by cloud; but all in all it was a great experience.
This left us with a free afternoon, and our peregrinations of the evening before had led us past possibly the only non-helicopter or non-hiking attraction of Franz Josef, the West Coast Wildlife Centre.
One can see kiwi there (they have a hatching support programme similar to the National Kiwi Hatchery we’d seen in Rotorua) and also Tuatara and Little Blue Penguins. A staff member illuminated the kiwi with a red torch so we could see it (as usual and expected, no photography allowed); and we timed our visit such that we could see the feeding of the penguins. There is a pool there where they do the feeding, and the penguins were whizzing about in anticipation of getting a meal.
This one was whizzing around in circles, coming up for a breath of air every so often
This angle makes one appreciate the streamlined nature of the penguin
There are about seven penguins there, all rescue animals for some reason or other, typically boat strikes or dog attacks; some of them are missing a flipper
but they were all delighted to be fed. A lass called Sophie came out and explained about the rescue programme, and did some feeding by tossing fish in for the penguins to nab themselves, and also stopping to hand feed some of the more badly injured ones to make sure that they got their meal.
Once the feeding stopped, most of the penguins got out of the water and congregated at one end to get their close-ups.
Very cute!
Our package at the Te Waonui included a free dinner, which we took in the posher of the two restaurants there, called the Canopy. I wonder why?
It was a five-course meal, and very fine it was, too. Afterwards we went for a walk to settle the meal down, and had a somewhat closer encounter with That Bird that Jane is anxious to see.
Our second day in Franz Josef started very early – another 0530 alarm – as we had to check in for our heli-hike at 0730 and we wanted to make sure we got a breakfast down us first. We kitted ourselves out in the best approximation we could make of gear appropriate for hiking on a glacier (layers of clothing, gloves, hats, decent walking shoes) and made our way to Franz Josef Glacier Guides,
where it soon became apparent that this glacier hiking thing was a bit more serious than that. We checked in and filled in the usual medical disclaimer which said that if we died it was our fault, and joined our group, among which we were the oldest by an estimated two generations! We had to do a miniature assault course – a couple of huge steps up and down without using handrails, to make sure we could cope with that kind of activity Up There, and then our guide, a lovely Norwegian lass called Guri,
got us weighed and kitted out in proper hiking-appropriate boots, jackets and trousers, carrying our crampons in red bags,
and prepared us for what might go wrong – ice fall, rock fall, delay in being picked up, possibly an unscheduled overnight stay on the mountain if the weather really kicked up rough. She then led us to their helipad – a half-kilometre walk, actually – where, unfortunately, she got the news that the weather outlook was for the cloud to come in, so our trip was cancelled.
We both received this news with mixed emotions: disappointment that we wouldn’t be able to do the trip; relief that the concomitant opportunity to make a complete arse of oneself on a mountainside has disappeared; stoicism that of course they had to be safe and couldn’t afford to take the chance. But since today was our last day here, rescheduling was not an option. Ah, well; we’d been pretty lucky everywhere else, and at least we’d had the scenic ride. We felt very sorry for some of the young things in our group, though, who had been eagerly anticipating their first-ever helicopter ride.
Having taken coffee, we walked past a display in the town which showed a photo from 1905 of Edwardian folk doing the glacier hiking thing.
At first I wondered how the hell they got up to the glacier, but then realised that in those days it probably reached right down the mountain so one could more easily scramble up to it (and the surroundings in the photo bear that out). There was also a photo of something we’d missed out on, which is an ice cave visit
and I think those folks are rather better kitted out than the ladies and gents in the photo above it.
Further walking around the town gave us the chance to get a better photo of a Tui
and also of another local phenomenon.
The New Zealand Marmite, we’d seen before, and, having heard the Men At Work song, we knew about Vegemite; we think Promite is a New Zealand version of Vegemite, but we weren’t prepared to buy some to find out. Well, not at first, anyway.
This left us with time on our hands, and, in recognition of the early start we decided to console ourselves by getting some rest, in order to recover before going for a walk. Obviously. The walk that Jane had picked out started after a short drive out of town to the Franz Josef car park. From there the original plan had been to do the Sentinel Rock trail with half an eye on the possibility of being able to take a picture of That Bird, the one we’d failed to get a decent photo of the evening before. So, I attached the Big Lens to the Big Camera and we set off for the car park. We discovered that, as well as Sentinel Rock, one could walk up to a viewpoint for the Franz Josef Glacier, so we decided to do both. The local birds, having seen me attach the Big Lens, all either fell utterly silent or buggered off en masse. I heard one bell bird the entire time we were walking, and I think it’s tone was somewhat mocking.
The walk to Sentinel Rock is short and quite steep
but the view at the end is worth the climb.
There’s an info board there which gives an idea of how much the glacier has receded (19km from the shore that it originally reached) and also shows that the Edwardian ladies and gents could quite easily have walked up to it in 1905.
We doubled back and then headed to the Glacier viewpoint. It’s reasonably clear where it is when you get there.
The view is majestic, but not quite as exciting as the one you get from a helicopter zooming up it.
On the way back to the car, Jane spotted this rather lovely example of a “fiddlehead” – the unfurling new frond of a fern.
Back in the town I decided that we should buy some Promite after all, so we popped into the shop to get some. Heading back to the car, we heard the distinctive call of That Bird, so Jane went to investigate and excitedly bade me hasten myself over with the Big Lens in hand. So I got the Lens out of the Kia and hurried over and was able to start taking photos of a Kea.
Anyone expecting a brightly coloured bird tends to be disappointed in New Zealand, where most birds are brown so as to camouflage themselves against the endemic predators, falcons or hawks. That’s why these Keas are the colour they are. However, if you get up close, you can see that there’s a subtle variation, and these Keas, identified as juveniles by the yellow eye-ring which becomes grey in adulthood, were clearly too young to know the rule of bird photography that says you bugger off when a Big Lens comes out. They obligingly came closer and indeed ended up doing something they’re known for, which is disassembling bits of car trim.
Jane was hoping to see the flash of colour on the underside of their wings, and so we spent a certain amount of time and a ridiculous number of shots trying to capture a photo of them in flight. But we got there in the end, thanks to luck, persistence and the excellence of Nikon autofocus.
So, that was it for Franz Josef – a couple of good days, a touch of bad luck with the weather, but an excellent glacier helicopter ride and some successful photography.
The morrow sees us moving further south again (possibly via another glacier view walk) to a lake, so there will probably be more decent shots to view, should you want to come back and take a look.
