Saturday 14 March 2026 – The morning dawned at Lake Moeraki with bright sunshine, and mist on the lake.

We had to leave the Lodge, but there were fantails fossicking about outside our bedroom, and so I had another go at photographing them, because they are such cute creatures.

I finally managed to get a photo of one fanning its tail!

It’s about 170km from Lake Moeraki to Wānaka, which was our next stop. According to Google Maps, it should take two and a half hours. It took us seven. Admittedly, one of those hours was due to my forgetting to hand in our room key before we left the Wilderness Lodge. I only discovered this at our first stop, providentially just 30 minutes down the road, so we hightailed it back to the Lodge and I slunk in and left the key on an unattended reception desk. Hopefully, no-one will have noticed.

Our first stop, though, was rather charming. Virtually the entire journey to Wānaka is through bits of the country which have the Haast label, so Julius (or Johannes, depending on your choice of AI) von Haast was obviously a chap of considerable pith and moment as far as New Zealand is concerned. There’s a Township, a River, a Mountain, a Pass (which leads to Wānaka) and, oh yes, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. With a visitor centre. To get to Haast, we had to cross the longest single-lane bridge in New Zealand

which is so long it has two passing places along it.

It’s rare to find a visitor centre described as “outstanding”, but this one is, and it’s a description that’s hard to fault. For the centre attendant upon such a small town, it’s huge,

and has a lot of information inside.

The information covers the environment, the ecology, the geology, the history and the wildlife – and it has a lot of each of those.  One animal we’d hoped we might be able to see in the flesh but couldn’t is the Fjordland Penguin, or Tawaki.  The reason we couldn’t see it is twofold: it’s endangered, and therefore somewhat rare; and its breeding season is December so it has wisely buggered off in search of a life at sea. But the visitor centre had an example in a display case

which shows it’s a crested penguin, similar to the Macaroni and Rockhopper penguins we saw on our Antarctic trip, in South Georgia and the Falklands. (Coo! Three plugs in one sentence! Nice one, me!) There’s also some decent scenery outside to be taken in.

After returning the key to the Lodge, we took coffee at the Spiker cafe again before pressing on towards Wānaka. The Lodge had thoughtfully provided driving information, which gave us the very strong impression that there was a lot to see on the route, and Jane’s researches had confirmed this. As well as the formal Things To Gawp At, there were times we could stop and marvel at the landscape surrounding the River Haast

including its confluence with the River Landsborough.

There were three waterfalls to be Gawped at: Roaring Billy

Thunder Creek;

and Fantail.

We had hoped to be able to see the Gates Of Haast, which is an impressive gorge with a road bridge over it; but the road was subject to roadworks and we would have been pretty unpopular had we stopped, so we had perforce to skip that. The final Gawpee was the Haast Pass Lookout, which, we discovered, was up quite a climb. The track to it is through rainforest

and is occasionally steep and clambery.

But were we put off? No! (Well, not since we were half way up by this point, anyway.)

The view at the top is worth the climb, particularly once you combine that with the smug sense of achievement attained through clambering 100m vertical up an average 1-in-7 slope.

Just as we left the lookout platform at the top, three young girls came charging up with some kind of music playing boom box, obviously intent on a bit of a shindig, so we had a narrow escape there.

After the lookout, the road drops down towards Wānaka, skirting two lakes, Wānaka

and Hāwea.

It’s clearly very photogenic, but what also struck us was the complete change in landscape, from green rainforest to tawny grassland. It’s a very sudden and marked change

and this is the landscape surrounding Wānaka. Stopping to gawp at the scenery was the main reason that a two-and-a-half hour drive took us seven hours to complete, and we’re glad that we made a day of the journey. We arrived at our accommodation, the Criffel Peak View B&B, and were made heartily welcome by the very animated host, Caroline, who provided us with tea and gave a running commentary about the state of the town, which, she said, would be utterly heaving, because of the A&P (Agricultural and Pastoral) Show, now probably the biggest show of its kind in the country. Fortunately, we’d taken a bite to eat en route, at the Blue Pools cafe in Makarora, so didn’t need to find a place at a restaurant. But we fancied a glass of something cold and a peek at the town, so we pottered in as the sun set

and found the bit by the lake where all the bars are.

Indeed, it was, erm, vibrant.

but we managed to find somewhere to sit and order a drink, and absorbed the vibe as the light faded.

We headed back to our accommodation and did the sort of thing that occurs to one after a glass or two: we looked at the stars. Well, it was a clear night, and we’re in a different hemisphere from normal, so it’s an obvious thing to do, right?

Photographically, it was always going to be a bit challenging, what with no tripod and that. but we took a few pictures with Night Mode on the phone

and a couple with the Nikon, handheld,

and the results were not entirely unusable.

That was it for the day, then. We had no formal activity planned for the morrow, but Caroline had planted an idea about what we could do with a day on our hands. So that’s what we’ll probably do and you’ll have to come back to find out what that was.