Glenorchy

What a long but great day. We ended up driving an hour to Glenorchy last night to camp at the base of our hike. Our kayaking guide had recommend the Rockburn track so we thought we would try a portion of it. We hadn’t studied the topo map very well and had anticipated the hike would take us above the tree line, we were wrong as the portion we did meandered through the wet muddy forest. We passed a pretty lake on the way and had to climb over a few fallen trees. We walked 2.5 hours before turning around at the first campsite. We hurried back as we had booked a Lord of the Rings horse ride for the afternoon.

On arrival at Dart Stables, they gave us helmets and boots and assigned us to a horse. I was riding Bob and Rebecca, Eden, The ride lasted over 2 hours and we crossed many high river. Rebecca’s horse was smaller and the water came up to her knees on one crossing. The landscape was beautiful. We were situated in a long valley in which a large river ran through and ended in longest lake in New Zealand. The mountains surrounding had small snow-capped peaks and we saw one of the Misty Mountains from Lord of the rings. Interestingly, Peter Jackson CGI’d 3 different mountains together to create the Misty Mountains in the movies. The Lord of the Rings references were minimal but it didn’t matter with the beauty of the surrounding landscape. We even got the horses to trot a little. My horse was great. Rebecca’s was sneaky and kept eating grass when it shouldn’t.

We hit the road after our ride and headed towards to Wanaka. We had planned some hiking around there but our DOC campsite was far to the north so we ended up only stopping in Wanaka to buy some chips and candy. We will have to head back there some day for the hikes. To get to our campsite we had to drive along a really bad gravel road for 30 minutes. Not fun, but the views were nice.Read more