After spending several days in the rain driving down the West Coast we were pretty happy to leave it behind and arrive in sunny Lake Wanaka. Wanaka is is a beautiful little town nestled within a ring of stunning mountains.


As I mentioned earlier, we saw very few people while driving along the West Coast of the island. We drove through entire towns that seemed completely deserted and kept asking ourselves "where are all the people?".

When we arrived in Wanaka, we found the people...ALL the people! The campsites in town were PACKED full of people, tents, boats, bikes and cars.  We actually passed on staying at the Lake Wanaka Top 10 Holiday Park campsite for the night when they offered to cram us into a tiny (technically not a spot) spot between two campsites.


So we drove onward about 10 minutes out of town to the Glendhu Bay campsite and were fortunate enough to be given one of the very last spots available. Evidently the entire population of the South Island camps in Wanaka between Christmas and New Years. Entire extended families were all camping together and had some seriously elaborate tents systems set up. There were kitchen tents, sleeping tents, family hang out tents, and children time-out tents. It was pretty impressive. Aside from being overwhelmed by the volume of people in one tiny campsite we were also a little ashamed by our lack of tenting accessories. I am fairly certain we got a few crazy looks as we "set up camp" with our tiny campervan awning!

After days of hardly seeing anyone - it was a bit of a shock to be packed in with so many other campers but it was a fun family friendly environment. The campsite is right on the lake so we enjoyed a post evening stroll through the campsite and along the lake, secretly checking out and ranking all the fancy tents as we went along.

Tea and a serious game of Gin Rummy was our typical post dinner routine.  Poor Kingsley didnt stand a chance at cards but he was a good sport about it (most of the time).