As you may recall we spent last night at a wonderful lodge outside of Wanaka. We woke up a little on the late side and tried to decide what we wanted to do today. Ultimately we decided that we were mainly interested in going for a bike ride, however we would utilize what I call “The Kismet Principle” (which means we don’t specifically make reservations and if it is supposed to happen, then we will be able to do it and if it isn’t then things won’t align properly). With that in mind we left the lodge for breakfast in Wanaka.
Right off the bat things looked good. I lucked into a four hour free parking space not too far from the center of town. We found a good place for breakfast which Robin and I both liked and shared a table with a lovely New Zealand couple. After breakfast we tried to find a place to rent bicycles and it just wasn’t happening so Robin said, “let’s walk around the lake and look for Southern Crested Grebes.
Wanaka did something interesting to help the grebes: they built special nests for them to use for laying their eggs. They are along the side of the lake and the grebes seem to love them. The Southern Crested Grebe is somewhat rare so this is a good thing. When we walked around the lake the previous day we say some activity but we didn’t have binoculars or anything else to better see them. This was a chance to make up for that.
There were several grebes in the water including some parents with young ones either on their back or swimming near them (look carefully at the pictures and you should see one on the back of a grebe and another (well, actually the same one I think) swimming between the parents in another picture. It was very exciting seeing them.
I’m very proud of the pictures as I tried a trick suggested to me: I took the monocular I have and carefully put it in front of my iPhone camera lens allowing me to take a pictures much closer then I could get otherwise. I think the pictures came out pretty well. You’ll have to tell me what you think.
The park also had a feature where you could fill your water bottle, camelback, or whatever with free spring water direct from the source. We did and the water was amazing. Below are pictures of our time at Lake Wanaka.
The rest of the day was pretty unremarkable which was fine with us. It was a two hour drive to Lake Tekapo. Once again Robin found us a great place, a one bedroom apartment not far from town. We spent the night relaxing in anticipation of our major hike tomorrow.
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