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Daily Photo: The view across Lake Wānaka

Driving south from Makarora on State Highway 6 is a curious exercise in New Zealand’s habit of making ridiculously spectacular scenery look entirely effortless. You start out among modest pockets of silver beech forest, where sandflies assemble in organised unions to plot your immediate demise the moment you open a car window, before the road abruptly swings alongside Lake Wānaka.

For the next 24 kilometres, the scenery becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. To your right, the lake stretches away in an almost absurd shade of blue, the sort of blue that makes you wonder whether someone from the local tourism board comes out before breakfast with a paintbrush and touches it up. The highway hugs the shoreline with alarming intimacy, winding beneath towering rock bluffs and passing places with wonderfully understated names like Camp Creek.

Eventually, the road climbs towards The Neck, that narrow strip of land between Lakes Wānaka and Hāwea where a glacier appears to have taken one look at the landscape and decided that filling both valleys was probably easier than choosing between them. Then comes the Lake Wānaka Lookout, which is one of those places where the sensible thing to do is pull over.

So you do. You step out into the biting Southern Alps breeze, camera in hand, and look across the water towards jagged, snow-dusted peaks. For a few minutes, there isn’t much to do except stand there and take it in. And, perhaps, feel slightly smug that someone had the foresight to build a paved road through all of this in the first place.