New Zealand - Moeraki, Mount Cook, Wanaka - Lil Miss Muffet Roadtrip

Happy Anniversary Otago! My enthusiasm for this regional public holiday springs from the fact that it gave both Mike and Ashley a long weekend which gave us a window of roadtripping opportunity. So we rented ourselves a car and made plans to go to Mount Cook.

Bright and early on a dreary and rainy (i.e. usual) Sunday morning in Dunedin, we loaded ourselves into Lil Miss Muffet, aka SuperLame, our Vitz rental hatchback and set out for Mount Cook and sunshine.(The more curious may wonder about the nicknames for the car. Within about fifteen minutes of driving around in it, we were forced to conclude that this car was powered by a lawn mower engine and made of plastic. We tested out this theory. Maximum speed flooring it in D2 was 123km/hr and that's coming off a big downhill stretch. Maximum speed flooring it on flat road was 113km/hr. Maximum speeding climbing a hill was 78km/hr. There were some hills we really wondered if we'd make it. Also, the ventilation system would only work for ten minutes at any time, leading to multiple fog ups in the car in the mornings. And the CD player would only play ten tracks off of any CD before skipping tracks automatically. Quality.) We had been told by many locals that it's only Dunedin's cursed coastal location that makes its climate so appalling (sorry Mike and Ashley...) and that inland Otago usually had great weather this time of year.

We decided to drive north to Oamaru then west to Omarama and then north to Twizel and Mount Cook on the way there. About twenty minutes outside Dunedin, the skies miraculously cleared and the sun beamed upon us. Along the way we stopped at one in every ten photoworthy moments - you become a scenery snob pretty quickly when the getting's this good! Stops included the Moeraki boulders, 15 million year old bowling ball shaped rocks on the coast; the dams of the Waitaki River; and Lake Pukaki, which we would never have found had it not been for a missed turn off for Mount Cook Road.



The brilliant sunshine continued in Mount Cook. The Visitors Centre in Mount Cook Village recommended we spend the afternoon on the Hooker Valley trail, as it offered some of the best scenery of the mountains. So we did. It's about an hour and a half to two hours each way. The path winds through the pass between the mountain ranges along the river between Mueller and Hooker Lake and includes three bridges. Mike, being the least keen walker I've ever met, was shockingly content with this choice. At least, until we were close to the end, at which point we were all ready to see Hooker Lake already.



The walk certainly did the trick for wiping us out though - we all slept like babies that night. Just before bed though, we got up the energy for one more activity - stargazing. The skies over the Mount Cook area are renown for their lack of clouds and generally awesome potential for stargazing. But because we are cheap travellers and students, instead of driving an hour each way and paying $35-60 to go to an observatory, we drove ten minutes each way and spent $2 of gas money to go back to the Hooker Valley trail parking lot and did it there. And let me tell you, no observatory was needed - the sky was phenomenal. We were entranced for a good thirty minutes despite fairly cold night temperatures.

Mount Cook had clouded over overnight, which was unacceptable to our trio of sun hunters. We were on the road again chasing the blue skies south by 8:30am to drive down to Wanaka for the afternoon. We caught up with the sunshine quickly and two and a half hours of more stunning scenery later, we arrived.

Since it was still early, we opted to check out Puzzling World, a local tourist attraction of mazes and illusions. Pretty funny photos were a result. Note about the mazes: while I completed all four and Mike and Ashley completed three of them, we were too hungry to bother with the final challenge of finding the exit again, so we cheated and took an emergency escape door. No regrets.

Wanaka was lovely - the lakeshore looks across to Mount Aspiring National Park. We enjoyed a leisurely picnic bench patio lunch and then were off again for the four hour drive back to Dunedin. We also ducked off the main motorway to the Southern Scenic Route for the last half hour of the drive, and though its monstrous hills taxed Lil Miss Muffet to the max, totally worth it for some of the views of the coast. The highlight of the trip was really the drive moreso than the destinations. South Island is absurdly beautiful on a sunny day. Too bad the whole island has to share the one sunny day that travels around the jetstream with the other fourteen days of rain and cold.