Day 4: Sunday 1st December
I had grown to quite like Queenstown after my original thoughts. It was in a beautiful setting with mountain views on the edge of Lake Wakatipu and it turned out to be a great base for the activities we wanted to do.
It was now time to pick up the hire car. We had chosen to hire from Omega and it was quite convenient as it had a base we could walk to in the town centre so there was no need to go back to the airport to pick it up.
So our road trip began…. The car was a Toyota Corolla, an automatic which we were used to, and as driving is on the left, the same as UK we quickly got used to driving it. The drive without any stops was only supposed to be about 2 hours so not too taxing for the first day. We set off towards Arrowtown, an old gold rush town with many old buildings from that time. Before going to New Zealand we were not aware of the Gold Rush in this area in the 1860s. Unfortunately they also had a farmer’s market on that day which had attracted far more people to the town and so we found it rather crowded. We had a little walkabout and wandered along the path to view the old preserved homes from the Chinese miners who had arrived in search of the gold.
We then drove on along The Crown Range, the highest main road in New Zealand. It zig zags up the mountains in places and gives impressive views across to The Remarkables. We made several photo stops on the way. It began to rain so we stopped alongside Lake Wanaka for some lunch and found a nice cafe called Relishes. They had a good variety on their menu and we had a nice lunch whilst keeping dry out of by now, fairly heavy rain. I remembered reading on the internet about The Lone Tree of Wanaka so thought we should try to find it while we were there. The rain had left off a bit and we soon found the tree as we could see a group of people ahead by the edge of the lake, so guessed it was there. We took several photos and then got back in the car in light rain. It was certainly worth the walk and despite the rain we managed to take some quite atmospheric photos.
It seems from reading reports on Trip Advisor that most people heading for the west coast glaciers break their journey for the night in Wanaka. Without stops this is only an hours driving from Queenstown, so we decided to continue on to Makarora leaving us with an hours less driving the next day.
Having booked to stay in Makarora I did have some reservations as it was just a very short turning off Haast Pass Highway, State Highway 6. Coming from the UK I was imagining the State Highways were going to be something akin to our motorways but with a little less traffic so I thought it could be a bit noisy. Well it couldn’t have been further from the truth. They were just normal single carriageway roads, well maintained and were so quiet we didn’t see another car for several miles. We arrived at this lovely homestead aptly named Makarora Mountainview and found it had three independent rooms totally surrounded by beautiful scenic mountains with the only sound coming from the birdsong and the occasional baa from a sheep. The friendly owner came out to greet us and take us to our room which had the biggest bed ever! It was a lovely room with a terrace with outdoor table and chairs and just amazing views of the mountains all around.
The rain had stopped, so after a relaxing cup of tea, we made our way down to the Makarora Country Café a few 100 yds away at the end of the road. It was a large pine clad building and had a welcoming real fire burning. There were a few people eating at the tables down the other end but we were only having a drink so we sat on a sofa by the fire. There was a nice young french couple alongside so we spent a pleasant hour chatting to them.
