Lake Wanaka is the perfect place to relax after a few days walking. It’s also the perfect place to exhaust yourself some more with some gorgeous hikes, but I’ll get onto that later! The day we arrived in Wanaka, we’d woken up at 5:30 to do the gorgeous Hooker Valley Hike over at Aoraki / Mount Cook village. That meant, that although we’d already been up for hours and walked on some beautiful hikes, we still arrived before lunch! But, what…
There are so many amazing places to walk in Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park. These are all the walks that we tried over two days when we stayed the night in Mount Cook Village. I have written them in order of difficulty, from the easiest stroll to the jelly-leg-inducing-epic-tramp. If you are heading to the area, you can choose the tracks that are best for you. We found a map for all of thee walks at the Mount Cook…
Marc, Tegan and I spent Monday evenings in February learning to ski at Cypress Mountain. They have weekly classes for adults called ALTS (adults learn to ski.) We had already taken our “never ever” classes for total beginners on Mount Seymour. You can read about that here. So this time, we were ready to learn to ski on Cypress…in the dark! I found these classes quite hard. I was definitely the worst in the class on some weeks, but that…
The Hooker Valley Track is truly gorgeous. It is an easy tramp near Aoraki / Mount Cook Village. It also has the best effort-to-epic-view payoff of any walk I have ever done. Seriously, for a short walk, the views for this hike are truly stunning. The problem is, everyone knows about it. As we started our other amazing day hike to Mueller Hut the previous day, it seemed like hundreds of people were heading off towards the Hooker Valley Track….