Wanaka and Tasman Glacier
Tags: Mount Cook, New Zealand, Tasman Glacier, Wanaka
Date: December 25, 2024
We continued on to Wanaka where we celebrated Christmas with a traditional Danish Christmas dinner. We hadn't brought any food items from Denmark due to the New Zealand restrictions on bringing food to the country. Everything had to be sourced in the local and fortunately, very well-stocked supermarkets. We were able to find everything needed to make duck, followed by ris a l'amande with cherry sauce, and marzipan sweets for after.
On Christmas Day we went for a much needed walk on the shore of Lake Wanaka. We saw several New Zealand fantails, small native birds named for their propensity to display their tail feathers by fanning them out:
Which, unfortunately, it did not do on these pictures:
The shore of Lake Wanaka:
From Wanaka, we drove north to the Mount Cook village where we had rented cabins for a couple of days.
On that first day we saw the Tasman Glacier and the Tasman Glacier Lake:
The glacier is visible in the background of the picture above. It is New Zealand's largest glacier at over 20 km long. This lower part is almost completely covered in gravel sliding down from the steep sides of the hills surrounding the glacier but the ice can be seen at the light-colored strip at the water edge where the ice breaks off the glacier to float out into the lake:
Most of the ice floes are quite dirty.
The end of the lake viewed from a hillside:
The water leaves the lake on the right and the large ice floes are stuck on the bottom
Looking to the right we could see the almost dry riverbed of Tasman River, where the water from Tasman Lake flows into:
More views of the the Tasman Glacier and Lake:
Looking down onto one of the so-called Blue Lakes:
The lakes were named in the 1880's and at that time they were fed by turquoise glacial melt water from the Tasman Glacier. However, the Tasman Glacier has shrunk and water no longer flows from the glacier into the Blue Lakes. Instead the lakes are fed by warmer rain water supporting the growth of green algae which have turned the Blue Lakes green.