On our way to the westcoast we stopped for a day in Wanaka. It’s a small, but beautiful city just next to a beautiful lake. As you would guess we did not stop for no reason. We knew there are some rocks around the city to climb and thats what we did! We enjoyed some Lakeside Bouldering with boulders up to V7 and after a 20km drive along the lake we arrived at the „Main Cliff“. The rock was ok, but it did not impress us enough to grab the rope and the quickdraws to do some ropeclimbing. It’s always a struggle to go ropeclimbing just by yourselfe, carring one baby and no babysitter around.
 |
| A pass south of Wanaka |
We decided to stay around the parking lot and did some bouldering there, which was fun and enough for today.
After some dinner in Wanaka, we enjoyed beeing in one of the few places in Newzealand having fast and free WiFi, did some Skype-Sessions and had a glance on some of the photos I took so far.
 |
| Katinka climbing a nice V5 at Lakeside, around Wanaka |
The next morning we jumped back into our van and moved on. Finja lost her psyche to sleep and sit in the van all day, so we could only do short sessions of driving (50km max), but every now and then we had to stop anyways, because of the beauty of the country. We did some hikes along the westcoast beach which are beautiful and drove north. Sadly it got more and more touristy. Lots of campervans, expensive looking hostels and no camping signs everywhere. And all over a sudden our van didn’t like driving anymore. We heard some backfire from the exhaustion pipe and with a speed of 80km/h our engine turned off. It wasn’t to bad, since we could just turn it on again, but it started to happen more often. After a while the engine would turn off every 500m and restarting the engine drained our battery. In the end we got stuck in the middle of nowhere, enough gazoline, but no more battery juice.
Luckily we catched a ride with a local we towed us the last 15km until we reached a small garage in Harihari. There were already other travelers having a overheating problem with their van and they had been waiting in front of the garage for the hole day, since the repair man had a lot of cars to fix. Since we have a little Baby with us, he was really friendly to us and even postponed his lunch break to fix our car. It was not a big deal, only the sparkling plugs were worn out and a few parts needed a replacement. 75$ later the car was back on the road and we could end second day driving in Hokitika, sitting at the beach and cooking some delicious pasta dinner.
 |
| Chilling at the beach – Westcoast |
After the repair we had picked up the german hitch-hiker Torre. He has been in Newzealand since early dezember and his next Destination was Castle Hill. The same destination we picked as a next stop! We had to do some more shopping and internet business, so we could only hitch him to Hokitika, but the next morning we met him at the Craigieburn Campsite at Castle Hill. He could only have a quick glance on the boulders we were trying to climb within the next couple of weeks, since he had to catch a flight from Christchurch to Melboure in the evening. He planned to leave the country for four days and be back afterwards, only to extend his Newzealand visa.
 |
| Westcoast |
After to days of climbing in pretty warm conditions, a lot of blue sky and only a little wind, we now sit in the library of Darfield, about 70km from the climbing area and write this blog post. We are only getting started here, so read back in a couple of days! We plan to stay and climb here for about 3 weeks now.