Paradise Found

It was dark when my alarm went off this morning. I made some breakfast and we had quick showers. Just time for a picture of the first light hitting the clouds over the lake before our ride for the day arrived.

Jenny is from Private Discovery tours who specialize in guided trips around the Queenstown area. She was born in Dunedin and has lived most of her life in Otago so she knows the area very well; every time we passed a valley or river she’d walked it, cycled it or kayaked it.

We left at 8:00. Our first stop was at Bobs Cove, a short way up the lake from Queenstown. We walked through some thick woodland down to a small stony beach for some great views of the lake in the morning sun. We could hear a lot of birds in the trees; we walked along the path behind the beach to try and see some of them. We’d heard a few Tui around New Zealand, eaten at the Fat Tui burger bar and drunk a Tui beer but this was the first one we’ve seen. They have a beautiful song and this one had a lot to say, although he was close by he was determined to stay in the shade of the branches. We also saw a South Island Robin and some Fantails – a good omen.

As we turned north towards Glenorchy round a kink in the lake, the mountains of the Southern Alps came into view in the distance. We stopped at a couple of viewpoints to see them; one high up above the lake and one on another small beach. Glenorchy itself is a small town that is growing rapidly as an overflow from Queenstown. It has some nice looking cafés, shops and restaurants, Florence found time to do a bit of clothes shopping while Jenny collected our lunch.

We then headed into the area beyond the lake where two large rivers – The Rees and The Dart – have huge stone and gravel deltas. We went off road to have a look at Lake Reid, a small lake with a large waterfowl population, and then climbed up a dirt road to stop for lunch overlooking Diamond Lake. It was a great view with the lake in the foreground and the mountains beyond. Our Land Rover coped well with the lumpy fields, dirt roads and dust. Private Discovery have an arrangement with a number of local farmers to allow them to drive on private land to get to places other tours don’t, this means a lot of getting in and out to open and close gates and in one instance walking over a bridge that isn’t sufficiently safe for us to be insured if we were in the car.

After lunch, we headed to Paradise Valley; we’d seen some photos of this area when we were researching New Zealand and that led us to today’s excursion. Beyond the valley, we saw the huge Dart River Flats then crossed the Dart River to Kinloch on the opposite side of the lake to Glenorchy. We stopped for some pictures on the long bridge crossing the Dart for some pictures, there isn’t much water in the river at this time of the year, it’s much fuller in spring. Jenny showed us the level of the floods in the early 1990s; these filled the valley and almost came up to the road. Only the Shotover River flows out of Lake Wakatipu, it couldn’t cope with the volume of water coming in from the mountains so the lake level rose and Queenstown was flooded enough for people to kayak down the main street.

We reluctantly returned to Queenstown around 4pm. The scenery around Lake Wakatipu is varied and lovely, this was a great way to see a lot of it.

We had a light dinner followed by two local cheeses and some Pinot Noir.