Wanaka – Every couple of days our landscape completely changes, though even by that notion I have to admit I never expected to come upon a friendly little beach community when arriving at Wanaka. All of a sudden the desire to keep pushing forward, forward, forward has been melted out of me – I could disappear here quite happily, losing day after day just wandering the beach, reading my gargantuan paperback, drinking the local on the various patios along the waterfront, and not talking much. If they had a decent rum, I might never go home. The best steak sandwich I’ve ever had, along with a couple of pints, made a fairly strong case for the place, regardless.
I was too hard on Te Anau – it is the hiking lodestone, apparently, for this part of the world, and I could go back and spend a month on its various multi-day and single-day tracks. The lady at Miles Better Pies told us about her favourite track, which she does with her 80-year-old mum, which “slows her down a bit” as she puts it – though between the general New Zealand hardiness and these peoples’ seemingly endless ability to vastly under-represent over over-represent every single quantitative value, I have no doubt that the 80-year-old in question could hand me my ass out on that hike and still have plenty of energy left over to bake me in a pie.
With relentless sunny skies in Arrowtown and Wanaka, and high-20s weather on the beach, we got our first chance at some real stargazing on Saturday night – so Dave drove us out around the bay to get away from whatever night light a tiny burg like Wanaka is capable of putting out, and we lay in a big open field and watched the sky open up over the course of several hours. The trick when stargazing with absolutely nothing in one’s peripheral vision but the sky itself is to try to lure your brain into believing that you aren’t lying on a planet looking UP, but rather clinging desperately to your world, looking DOWN into the bottomless vastness of the Whole Damn Thing. As a meditation exercise, it’s decent; as a pointed reminder of the watchwork magnificence of the Whole Damn Thing and the peculiar fortune of our window seat on this wild ride, it’s exceptional. These weren’t my favourite stars ever, of course; those are elsewhere. When you peer deep into something and see stars twinkling back, it tends to grab hold of you, and never lets go. Regardless, I saw six shooting stars over the course of the night, and wished for the same thing on each one (does that count)?
We drove home from the starry night with Demetre blasting “We Don’t Need Another Hero” on the car stereo, which is his theme song. We’re staying at the WanakaBakpaka – half hostel, half the best cottage you’ve ever had the pleasure to kill a weekend at – and when we got to our room, the new Katie, a bald British male, took one look at Demetre and I and said, “It was better last night; it was 2 Danish birds in here,” before returning dejectedly to his bed. Having entirely forgotten the existence of bikinis till I arrived in this place, and having some kind of mental picture of what Demetre and I must have looked like at that point in time, I can’t say I’m in a position to disagree with him.
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