07.-11.04.2018 CHRISTCHURCH & WANAKA

My flight was pretty uneventful, at the airport I bought a sim card and a bit later, I arrived at the hostel. It was completely filled with Germans, however nobody seemed to be in the mood to talk (me neither, I was wrecked) and so I went straight to bed after sending out a couple of couchsurfing requests for the next days.

In the morning I had gotten an answer from John, a 65yo who grows his own vegetables in his garden, has hosted ofer 450 (!!!) people in his home in Christchurch and was just generally a fantastic human being.

On the way from the hostel to his house, I walked through the park in front of the hostel as well as the Botanical Gardens. Arriving at John’s, I met some other girls who were staying there at the same time, one each from Denmark, Austria (the first Austrian I met on this trip!), Finland, the Netherlands and Germany. We spent a lovely time together, singing, cooking and playing cards.

I spent the whole next day with them as well, Louise and I decided to buy Agnettas car (a 1987 Ford Laser, automatic, with a choke) and took care of registration/insurance etc. The car is called “Blue”, because… you’ll never guess why… it is blue. In the afternoon, our group was joined by yet another German, Katja. Her and I did Sudoku together and taught John how to do it. We had Fajitas for dinner and for dessert, Katja and I made a gluten free apple crumble cake. In the evening, Louise and I stayed up quite some time to talk.

The next morning, we drove (okay Louise did, since my driver’s licence didn’t arrive in time for me to take it with me) all the way to Wanaka, it took us about 7 hours with a few stops for photos and lunch. When we were almost parked in front of the hostel, the car suddenly turned off – ahrg. Thankfully, a very friendly local guy came to our rescue, diagnosed the problem and came back 15min later with some spare oil he had in his garage :D. Afterwards, the car was running fine again – lucky us. For Dinner we had scrambled eggs on toast, then we started planning the next few days.

After breakfast, we drove to Roys Peak, the hike was about 16km and 1200m up. It took us about 4 and a half hours with lunch break, we passed loads of Asian tourists on the way up. The view was absolutely amazing, it was well worth the hike – Lake Wanaka, the town itself, the surrounding mountains… On the top, there was quite a bit of snow, I was freezing (forgot to take gloves with me) and you had to be careful not to slip on the ice, especially on the way down.

That night, we stayed at “Wanaka Bakpaka”, a great hostel that was recommended to us by Katja. In our room we met Martin, a Czech, and Clarissa, a German girl. We played Rummy with the fabulous half-sized Sissy playing cards I brought and for dinner, Louise and I had a great meal of spinach, brokoli, capsicum (still being bell pepper, still in love with that word), tomatoes & baked beans and a poached egg each.