News
July 2006: Makarora
This bulletin is mostly about Willem and Leta's trip to Makarora, Wanaka and Haast during the second week in July. Makarora nestles at the foot of the New Zealand Alps near the West Coast. Makarora itself is literally a one-horse town with one holiday resort that is a combined motel, backpackers' accommodation and campervan stop-over, the Makarora Wilderness Resort.
The town has no shops, but there is a petrol pump and small supply store at the resort. The restaurant at the resort was quite pleasant with a lovely big open fireplace, but would you believe that they closed at six o'clock in the evening and then all one can do is go to bed with a book. The nearest "civilisation" is at Wanaka, about an hour's drive back towards the East.
Next to the Makarora motel is an airstrip for the light aeroplane and helicopter that pick tourists up there for a flight over the alps, or to drop them off further in the mountains. Unfortunately when it rains heavily, as it does most of the time in that region, the ground turns too muddy for the plane to land.
Our plan was to hop on either the plane or the helicopter, get dropped off at the top of the Siberia Valley track and walk out along the Wilken River to the point where the jet boat would pick us up again and return us to the motel. Well, tough luck, there was too much rain.
So instead we drove along the pass through the Alps to Haast, another one-horse town, and had lunch there at a rather mundane tavern. All we have to show you are some very soggy pictures of the most amazing water falls we took along the way to Haast.
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Click on the thumbnail picture to see a larger image.
The first picture shows the main buildings of the resort and the second one is of our car parked in front of the chalet where we stayed. Yes, that is snow on the mountains! A-framed chalets are not a good idea - we kept bumping our heads against the roof beams.
The third photo is of the Thunder Creek falls in the Haast Pass. The white spots on the photo are rain drops. By the time we arrived at the Roaring Billy Falls (the fourth photo) there was thunder and lightning, and hail pelting down on us,so this time the white spots on the photo are actually hail stones. The last photo in this series is of the Haast river near the "Gates of Haast" bridge in the pass.
The trip was not a total disaster. The journey there took us through some of the most beautiful countryside, with breathtaking views of Lake Dunstan at Cromwell, vinyards and mountains in the Lowburn between Cromwell and Wanaka, Lake Wanaka and Lake Hawea.
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Here we have, from left to right, Lake Dunstan at Cromwell, vinyards at the Lowburn range between Cromwell and Wanaka, Lake Hawea (looking towards the town of Hawea at the eastern end of the lake), and the western end of Lake Wanaka closer to the Alps and the rainy weather conditions. The thing to keep in mind is that these lakes are huge and these photos cannot do justice the the magnificence of the scenery. You had to be there!
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The highlight of the trip was the beautifully sunny day we spent in Wanaka with our old friends Tommie and Louise and their two kiddies, Thomas and Andre. They currently live in Australia, but were here in New Zealand for a skiing holiday. After lunch we took a leisurely stroll along the edge of the lake while catching up on the news of the past five years since we last saw them.
Leta joined the Cantores Choir for a special concert with famous bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu on 31 July 2006 in the First Church of Invercargill. Cantores is a student choir, but singers from the general public were invited to join the Cantores for this concert, since they needed a few extra singers. Jonathan studied at the University of Otago in Dunedin and now performs mostly in London. He is the patron of the Cantores Choir, so whenever he visits his family here, the choir makes an effort to rope Jonathan in for a performance. For this concert the music was Mozart's Te Deum and Organ Solo Mass in C, and Handel's mass O, Praise the Lord.
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The concert was a roaring success and the bus trip and staying over in Invercargill was an interesting experience. See if you can spot Leta in the group photo in front of the bus, taken minutes before we piled into the bus and left for Invercargill.