Queenstown, New Zealand
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
I'm back! On the drive down to Queenstown we decided to stop off at a town called Wanaka. Its a beautiful small town on a lake with mountains all around. It is big for skiing in the winter and water activities in the summer. I guess we got there in between the seasons because nothing was open. We pulled in to town around 9:30 and night and all the receptions at the hostels were closed. Then we tried to find food but everything stop serving and was closing down (around 10 pm). We ended up finding one take out kebab place and we ate in the van. Ended up sleeping on the side of the road...thank God for the camper van. The next day we did some hiking on Mount Irons...has great panoramic shots of Wanaka and the lake. Then it started raining again so we went to Puzzling World. Its a big maze and all kinds of wierd puzzles and games. It was a fun rainy day activity. Since it was rainy, we decided to head on to Queenstown. We did hit a few vineyards on the way. Queenstown was just as rainy but it has more stuff to do
. We stayed in Queenstown for 3 days and only had one day of nice weather. The first day I went jetboating on the shotover river. They come unbelievably close to the rock walls of the canyon. I put a video on the pictures...check it out if you can. Also went to see some kiwis at the conservation center. The nasty weather that we had managed to dump a load of snow on the mountains around Queenstown. The one nice day we did Quad bikes through some of the small mountains. The cool thing about that was there was fresh snow on the peaks. The second half of the day we took the gondola up for scenic views of Queenstown and did the luge they have at the top. With all the snow in the Remarkables (mountains where they filmed "Lord of the Rings") we decided to do some skiing on the last day. But our bad luck with weather continued because they closed the road to the ski slopes due to too much snow. Can't control the weather...you have to be really flexible when traveling in New Zealand.
More pictures to come...having trouble uploading from this computer
Comments
BRRRR
we don't need coats here in fayetteville. have fun Dad
Re: BRRRR
nor do we............
need umbrellas............(since we dont have rainy days anymore)
Love,
Kathy