A weekend in Wanaka

This past weekend I went to Wanaka which is in Central Otago (middle of the South island) and near the Southern Alps. There were about 20 of us who all stayed up in a rented house in Wanaka. This was the 2nd weekend in a row that I was fortunate enough to travel up to the mountains due to Case's excellent car purchase. Its a 1992 Mazda Proceed and its named Marvie. Pretty sweet if you ask me.

Marv

It takes about 3.5 hours to go from Dunedin, where my school is, to one of the many ski resorts on the south island. The two main towns that most of the resorts are near are Queenstown and Wanaka which are both very lively, fun towns. We woke up and left Dunedin at around 9:00 am on Friday morning and made it up to Cardrona for a halfday of snowboarding. The snow was fresh and really nice compared to last weekend's ice and wind. The only bad thing was the clouds were sitting really low, like fog, and it was very, very hard to see.

Saturday we woke up at around 8:30 am in Wanaka and got out to Cardrona for an early start. We rode from about 10:00 am all the way until close at around 4:00 pm that day. It was the best day that I've had snowboarding so far in the southern hemisphere. There were bluebird skies all day, the snow was good, and it was overall a really fun time. Saturday was also one of the longest days of snowboarding I have gotten in in a while. Having a season pass can make you pretty lazy sometimes, so when you have to buy lift tickets each day, you take much better advantage of a full day.

Here are some pictures of the snowboarding.

Peaks

A view from Cardrona's parking lot. This was actually another day, there was not 1 single cloud on Saturday!

A picture from the top of the hill at Cardrona


Pete, Cristoph, Me, Case

Hand drag

Lake Wanaka

Tomorrow starts the 3rd week of classes here at Otago. Things are going well, classes aren't too tough, and I'm having a really good time so far. Also, I wanted to show that I've been cooking my own meals. And even though I really only know how to make about 3 types of things (food on the grill, pasta, stir fry), I'm pretty impressed with myself so far.

Stir fry