TA Day 18: Sunday 5 January 2025

Fern Burn Hut - Wanaka (Hampshire Holiday Parks - Wanaka)

This morning was chilly, not a problem for us, but Barry had apparently bailed and slept in the hut instead of his tent.

After breakfast we started the climb down. It wasn't as easy as we had hoped, and we were a lot more slow-going than we had planned.

But after some time we reached flat ground, passed the parking lot and then reached a place with a café and bike rental.

Here we had some salad, beer and ice cream, and as we left, the guys caught up with us. We walked together for some time, until Kim couldn't keep up with their pace anymore and started to fall behind.

Then we hiked on our own again in the blazing hot sun. After a while, we heard someone screaming our name, and apparently they had stopped for a swim, and thought we should join too. All the guys went for a swim, while Kim dipped her shirt in water.

Then we walked together again, and we were nice and cool for a little while at least.

It felt like forever, but finally we reached the Holiday Park where we all camped together. Then we went to have crêpes together - Kim talked about the crêpe place all day! And what a place. Charlie Brown's Crêpes were great! If you bought one, you got another one with butter and sugar for free if you were hiking the TA. So we got four. And on top of that, we also ordered a fifth one, just because they were so good! We were in heaven 😍 They also had homemade raspberry ice tea which was really good.

Then we were off to resupply.

Everything went smooth until we were back at the holiday park to do our laundry. Due to a misunderstanding, we realised we didn't have laundry powder. Lukas thought it was included, but now we saw that you needed to buy it at the reception, which was closed... So Lukas ran back to the store to buy laundry powder, and after that we could finally do laundry. It was clean and dry around midnight, and we were both quite tired and grumpy (but Kim especially). It was good when we could finally go to sleep.

Today's:

Distance: 26.27 km

Ascent: 424 m

Descent: 883 m

Tent nights: 11/18

Weather: Sunny and hot