Following the Mou Waho tour with Chris Riley we had 30 minutes for lunch before embarking on our afternoon tour of West Wanaka Station (ranch).
Mark Orbell of www.ridgelinenz.com picked us and a couple from Sweden up in his 4WD Toyota to see a totally different view of the Lake Wanaka area.
The Orbell family was one of the first families to arrive in Dunedin in 1849 and Mark is the 6th generation Orbell to live on South Island.
Mark has exclusive access to West Wanaka Station, a 30,000 acre ranch that has been in the same family for over 100 years. We spent the afternoon touring the ranch which is quite historical. We saw ruins from the original farm house built in 1860.
Mark had copies of black & white photos dating back to 1865 showing the original buildings that he had gotten from the local historical society.
In pre-European times, Maori used parts of the ranch as staging posts for seasonal food gathering trips. The Maori used underground ovens to cook young cabbage tree roots which have been found on the ranch. We visited one of these cooking pits.
European pioneers recognized the potential for farming, and the first settler on the ranch, H S Thompson, built a house there in 1859. By the late 1880’s, however, mismanagement and devastation by the introduced rabbit resulted in the pioneer settlers leaving Wanaka. The rabbits had eaten the grass intended for the sheep. Then the sheep contracted a disease which wiped them out. Thomson packed up and walked off the property after 25 years of a hard-scrapple existence.
Today, there are 4,500 red deer, 12,000 sheep and 1,000 Hereford and Angus cattle grazing the property. The deer graze up as high as 5000 feet and their view of the lake below is spectacular.
Before starting back down the foothills of the mountain Mark opened his "Alpine Cafe" and we had a 'cuppa' and some biscuits.
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