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…
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….
Out of all the hiking possibilities in New Zealand, this Mueller Hut day hike was the one I wanted to try the most. Most online descriptions of the walk advise you to hike up, stay the night at Mueller hut before returning the following day. But alas, I was too late to book accommodation, and we had no chance of staying up above the clouds. Looking at the statistics for the hike, I was pretty confident we could manage the…