NZ South Island, Wanaka – Could you live there?

“Almost no one here actually comes from Wanaka,” says our friend Ayse. She and Richard moved to this beautiful spot with their three kids (10, 12 and 13) just over a year ago, after 14 years in Singapore. She’s a Brit (of Turkish/Kurdish extraction) and he’s a Kiwi from Nelson.

Richard, Ayse and Roy at the place on Lake Wanaka “where everyone takes pictures”

Getting There

There are two possible routes between Queenstown and Wanaka and each takes about an hour. The first is the shorter but more tortuous route via the Crown Range and Cardrona Valley.

You could do it once for the views – and perhaps for the fun of striking terror into the hearts of cautious Chinese tourists as you zoom up behind them, as Roy likes to do – but I prefer the pretty route through endless vineyards and stone-fruit orchards via Cromwell.

The Cromwell basin is famous for its stone fruit – I’ve never tasted greengages like the ones in Ayse’s fruit bowl

The Tin Goose Café in Cromwell, a good place to stop for coffee on the way from Queenstown to Wanaka

Roaring Meg, a small hydro-electric power station on the Kawarau River, crossed by State Highway 6, the longer and less tortuous of two routes between Wanaka and Queenstown; and yes, there’s a Central Otago wine estate of the same name

Why to Get There Soon

Wanaka is a picture-postcard-perfect town, as Queenstown was to us when we first toured South Island by car in 2006 or thereabouts.

So visit Wanaka soon, while it’s still relatively unspoilt: Ayse and I walked up Mount Iron – “an impressive, glacier-carved, rock knoll rising 250m from the surrounding countryside”, and from the top she pointed out the new housing estates marked out for development.

Looking down from the summit of Mount Iron over a new development area on the outskirts of Wanaka

Five or ten years ago, everyone in the town knew everyone else. That’s no longer the case, apparently.

Active-wear is de rigeur in Wanaka, says Ayse, but most of its residents are genuinely active – unlike, say, the townsfolk of Redditch in England, who wear similar garb to hang out in the mall. They walk, they cycle, they do yoga, they kayak, they play tennis, they hike hills and they climb mountains. Come winter, she says, “everyone skis”.