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Published: February 5th 2010
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Bruce Bay
On our way to Wanaka It rained through the night and in the morning it was still raining, so we headed off on our long drive to Wanaka (about 5 hours from Fox Glacier). A little while after we had started our drive the weather cleared up, and then there was SUN! It was a really beautiful drive. The Haast pass follows alongside the river, and then through the mountains (that still have snow on the top of them). We drove alongside a lot of lakes as well. Since the weather was so nice, we stopped off at a couple of waterfalls along the way. We went to Thunder Creek waterfall, which seemed really popular because there were a ton of cars and buses parked to go there. Also we went to Fantail Falls, which had way less people and you could walk around more and get pretty close to the waterfalls.
Both waterfalls were quick hikes, and then we stopped off to see The Blue Pools. The sign said it was about a 30 minute return hike, so we figured it would be perfect to do and then have some lunch. We hiked in about 15 minutes or so and then passed over some
Bruce Bay
(and sunshine too!) swing bridges, saw the river, but didn't think that was the blue pools, so we kept on hiking. We hiked for another 30-45 minutes and we had veered away from the river and were in a forest, and then in a meadow. There were no signs around, but finally some other people passed us and we asked them where the path went. They said as far as they could tell it went on forever. We decided at that point to turn around (which turned out to be a good thing...we were on an 8 hour hike!) When we got back to the swing bridges we saw the signs marking that this was the spot for the Blue Pools. We looked in saw the brown trout swimming in there (which the sign had told us we'd see) but the water wasn't super azure like the picture had claimed it would be! After an hour and a half of looking for them we were kind of disappointed (later in the trip we met a couple who did the exact same thing we did!). Luckily the weather was perfect, so it wasn't so bad being lost outside. We got back to the van
and drove on to look for a bathroom and found a cafe, so we stopped there. They had food so we decided to eat some lunch while we were there. They had meat pies, so we each got one. I got minced beef and Adam got mutton sheep. They were small little pies, and were pretty good. A nice small lunch since we were eating so late.
We continued on and made it into Wanaka, which was a really nice town by the lake. The weather was still lovely there too. We bought tickets to go to the Cinema Paradiso, which is a theatre that has couches, loveseats, (even a car!) instead of regular seats. You can order dinner, get snacks, and even drink beer during the movie. The show wasn’t until 8:30p so we found a campsite and relaxed for a bit and had a light dinner. We went back to the theatre later and waited to go in and get seats. We bought some local beer (from Wanaka Beerworks). I had the Tall Black, Adam had a vienna lager. We got seats a little bit to the side on a loveseat. It was really comfortable. The movie
we saw was Inglorious Basterds, which was pretty good. They had intermission during the film, during which Adam got us a freshly baked giant chocolate chip cookie. It was amazing. The movie was over around 11:30pm, and we went back to our site. The sky was clear and the temperature outside was nice, so we decided to walk down to the lake. The moon was reflecting in the water, and everything was just really beautiful and peaceful. It was amazing.
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