Wanaka was not so far away but I was wanting to skip through to the other side, not get bogged down. After all, it’s only a few days since my rest day in Queenstown.

Well, I kind of made it, not quite as far as I had hoped but the tent is up and I have a view of the sun setting on the other side of the lake.

It was a slow start to the morning, I stayed in my tent, a beautiful night and now I’ve learned to sleep with it undone, then there’s not much in the way of condensation. There’s my system in place, I listen to the 6 am news and weather report. Today there’s a whole lot of nothing on the news and in the weather department, they are predicting showers somewhere a long way from Otago.

I made and ate breakfast, then a couple of trail runners in training for the Motutapu Challenge arrived, this was as far as they were going and we had a chat about life and its meaning. They had no idea as to how extreme the Challenge is. Put it this way — the record for the Kepler Challenge, 65 km, is four hours 32 minutes, the record for the Motutapu, close to half the distance, is over eight hours.

I’m told the key is in speed in the downhill direction, that’s where skilled runners make the gains.

I clearly would be hopeless, it was mostly downhill this morning. I left at around 9 am in the end, gals still in bed, for me that’s late, the car park a couple of hours away, the road and lake edge a bit more.

Wanaka, well, spent time eating, then some more.

Sat at the lake with the rest of the tourist mob and watched some grebes, scuas, and indiscernible ducks for a while. Eventually, I staggered around the corner away from the expensive homes and waited until most of the dog walkers had done their thing until setting up camp.

Ha, you camped THERE?

Dog tired.

← TA Day 21 | Fern Burn Hut, Motutapu Track TA Day 23 | out the back of the Lake Hawea Hotel →