From Okarito to Te Anau - Day 31

Rain? No problem! On today's drive along the southern part of the West Coast from the Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers to Lake Matheson and down to Haast, it poured like buckets. The weather forecast (metservice) did not disappoint! Nevertheless, we stopped at Lake Matheson, a so-called mirror lake: When the weather is calm, it reflects the highest mountains in New Zealand (Aoraki/Mount Cook and Rarakiroa/Mount Tasman). There was a whole herd of cows in front of the lake, mooing away as we arrived. A welcome orchestra, cool! Then we walked 15 minutes towards the jetty, the first viewpoint, but stopped because of the rain and made our way back to the car :))

Afterwards, we continued on State Highway 6 heading south. We stopped at several viewpoints, looked into the green valleys, collected jade stones or stones that had a green shimmer at Ship Creek Beach (near Haast), (there was also a small lookout tower that could be climbed via ladders) and were impressed by the Thunder Creek Waterfall on the Haast Pass-Makarora Road. Due to the heavy rainfall, waterfalls were already visible on the roadside during the drive; one was so close and powerful that it flooded the road a bit :))) The road left the West Coast and now ran through the mountains, luckily the weather improved as well. In sunshine, we passed the large mountain lakes Wanaka and Hawea, which surely offered at least as good a view as Lake Matheson could have. Shortly before Queenstown, after a decent ascent over the Crown Range Road, luckily our rental car was well motorized, we stopped at a viewpoint that delighted us with a fantastic view of Queenstown, Lake Wakatipu, and the surrounding mountains. Very impressive!

In Queenstown, we bought some things for our final hike of the vacation the next day. At 10 pm, after nearly 11 hours of driving (Google said 7 hours), we arrived at the accommodation in Te Anau. Very, very good accommodation in a house of a very friendly family!