Hamner Springs

As usual we woke up to the sound of my watch alarm this morning - meaning it’s time to drag our sleepy bodies from the warmth of the bed. As today was one of Andrea‘s session days we have a bit of breakfast before getting going - it is hard to do some harder running on an empty stomach. We made the short walk to the hostel kitchen to eat our muesli and it was as we tucked in that we realised that it was still only 5:30am!! I‘d accidentally set my alarm for an hour early. Oops! After apologising to Andrea profusely, we finished up and went back to bed to snooze.

Despite the tiredness Andrea’s session went well. And even though we had gotten up terribly early and had no real packing up to do (most of our stuff is at Emily’s) we only managed to get out of the hostel with 9minutes to spare (not quite the stuff of films, but too close for comfort - some of these hostels can be dead funny about check-out times!!).

Today we headed slightly inland and half-way back towards Christchurch to a place called Hamner Springs. It is a small alpine village with supposedly a population of only 750. You wouldn’t believe it though as it seemed really busy and there were streets upon streets of houses (quite likely that they are all holiday homes though). The reason we came to Hamner Springs was quite literally for the springs, as in the village they have used the spring water to create a large outdoor spa!! We donned our swimming gear for the first time this trip, Andrea even wore a bikini (for the first time in donkeys years - sorry A hehe), and went in. There were 12 different pools in total, ranging from 29C to 42C. We didn’t go in all of them as there was a chilly wind and you cooled down really quickly when moving between the baths. Also we found that at times it smelt like some of the guests were breaking wind (probably because the natural spring water had sulphur in it), but if you could see past some of the dodgy smells the spas were really relaxing. I had my camera on hand and managed to get some photos of the pools - they don’t seem to have rules here about taking photos with semi-nude peeps about.


Semi-nude bathers at the spa

After a couple of hours in the spas we headed up to Conical Hill Peak (around a 20min walk) to look out over the town and some of the surrounding mountains. A short but steep walk which realised some nice views.


Hamner Springs slightly obscured by the treeline