2025 New Zealand: January 1 - Milford Sound to Alpine Junction (Wanaka)

Xiaoqin woke up early, around 6am, and we got up in time to capture Alpenglow photos of the surrounds. It struck me then that the overnight cruise boat probably has the best view. The land resort would have trees nearby, while we were far enough out on the water to get excellent views of the surrounding mountains, and yet be far enough away from land to avoid the sandflies.

The crew got up onto the deck, and I had a chance to chat with the skipper, Jimmy McKay, and I had a good chat about the boat (I noticed the bow thrusters and he realized that I had some experience sailing). The kids woke up and while we ordered breakfast, the Fiordland Jewel weighed anchor and took us on a second tour of Milford Sound, this time in the morning light.

The cruise was much shorter than in the morning, as the boat had to arrive back at the dock by 9:00am for a 2 hour turnaround for the lunch cruise. This was a very hardworking boat! But we had breakfast, and got more gorgeous pictures in the morning sun. Jimmy told me that after we docked we needed to walk down to the last pier to get a picture of Bowen with the boat known as the Lady Bowen.

Indeed, in the time it took us to pack, the boat was already docked. I got a video of the first mate Jack docking the boat with just the controls on the port side of the boat—and he never needed the bow thrusters, which was how practiced he was.

We got off the boat, got a picture of Bowen with the Lady Bowen, and then hiked back to the car. From there, we reversed yesterday’s journey out to the Routeburn Track to hike up to the Key Summit. While Lake Marian was also an option, I noted that the Routeburn Track started higher and would likely get us better views from the Key Summit.

Indeed, the walk was fairly easy (we did not have a load), and when we got to the Key Summit we took the nature walk all the way to the far end, where we got a nice view of Lake Marian! The view was hard to find, and we were lucky that there were other hikers who told us where to stand and where to look.

We hiked back down slowly, taking pictures of the spectacular wilderness all around, and then got into the car to drive to Te Anau, where we had lunch at Miles’ Better Pies again and put more gas in the car.

We then drove back onto the Queenstown Road, but now instead of stopping at Queenstown, we kept going towards Wanaka. Just before the Crown Range  road there was a crash between an SUV and a Station Wagon, which stopped up the road. Fortunately, the crash was pretty recent and we made it past before getting stuck for very long at a traffic jam.

The Crown Range Road was astonishing in grade and narrowness, steeply climbing at 20% before cresting at 1121 meters. 1121 meters is not very high for California, but that was sufficient to make it the highest road in New Zealand! From the top we stopped for photos before descending into the Wanaka area. We actually couldn’t find any lodging in Wanaka, and instead stayed nearby, at Alpine Junction Apartments at Albertstown.

We arrived at 5pm and it felt hot! We checked into our apartment, and realized that it being New Year’s Day, there weren’t many restaurants that were open. We ended up buying pizza at the supermarket (which was open) within walking distance and cooking it and eating it at the apartment, which thankfully had both laundry machines and AC.