Wanaka is a lakeside town of about four and a half thousand at the southern end of Lake Wanaka, where the water is the colour of a glacier's thought and the mountains stack up behind in ranks. It has long been the quieter sibling to Queenstown over the hill, a place where people come to ski, tramp and sit on the shore, and a lot of them end up staying. The famous willow standing in the water near the lakefront is a tourist photo, but locals have been loyal to it for years.
Behind the town are the glacier-carved valleys leading to Mount Aspiring National Park and the peak called Tititea, or Mount Aspiring, a pyramid rising above 3,000 metres. The lake itself was gouged by a great ice tongue during the last glaciations, and the terraces and moraines around it still frame the landscape. In summer the hills are tawny and the water cold, in autumn the poplars and willows go gold, and in winter snow dusts the tops of the Pisa Range and the roads can ice in the shade.
For riders, Wanaka is the starting point for the Crown Range Road, one of the great climbs in New Zealand. It leaves the valley, passes the old Cardrona Hotel, a gold-rush survivor from the 1860s with a verandah made for a flat white, and then climbs in switchbacks to a summit of about 1,076 metres, the highest sealed main road in the country. The road down the other side to Arrowtown and Queenstown is a long, sinuous descent with the Wakatipu basin laid out below. It can ice or snow in winter, and chains are sometimes required, so check conditions. Surface is good, traffic is moderate with campervans, and the best hours are early or late when the light is low and the sun draws long shadows across the schist hills.
Fuel is straightforward in Wanaka, with several stations and a good run of cafes and bakeries along the waterfront and main street. Arrowtown, with a little over two thousand people, and Cromwell, with just over five thousand, are the next options, and the Cardrona valley is thin on services. Fill up before the Crown Range and bring layers, because the weather can flip within an hour.