It was sad to say goodbye to our beautiful Azur Lodge where we have spent the past four nights but it was time to get back on the road. We picked up the car but were a bit slow getting started and finally headed out of town at about 1 o'clock. We knew we had a 5 hour drive ahead of us and the first section took us up over the Crown Range to the lakeside town of Wanaka. What we hadn't bargained for was scary hairpin bends, very steep drops off the side of the road...

Back in Queenstown after our wonderful helicopter trip and the sun was still shining! We made our way down to the lakeside and booked in for the 'Million Dollar Cruise' which was due to depart soon after. It was a spur of the moment thing but we were so glad that we did this trip. It was a 90 minute tour round Lake Wakatipu. The sun was sparkling on the water and the views were just spectacular! The boat was small and friendly but also very comfortable and the c...

The weather this morning was beautiful, sunny and clear with nothing but a few fluffy white clouds in the sky. To our delight we got the call to say that the forecast for Milford Sound was good and our special helicopter trip could go ahead this morning. On arriving at Queenstown airport we were introduced to our pilot, Buck Rodgers (yes, really!!) and within minutes we were up, up and away in our beautiful Squirrel helicopter. From then on the 'wow' factor took...

We set off early for our white water rafting adventure, checking in at the Queenstown office at 8am. We had been gearing ourselves up for an exhilerating trip down the Shotover River so it was a bit of a disappointment to discover that, for various unexplained reasons, this had been re-scheduled to the Kawarau River, an altogether more sedate and less challenging experience. What was challenging though was the amount of wetsuit layers we had to put on!! By the ti...

We awoke in our beautiful private villa to a spectacular view of lake Wakatipu from our window and not a soul in sight. The slightly dodgy weather put paid to our proposed helicopter trip, but instead we decided to take advantage of the day to go up into the mountains for a jet boat safari. We enjoyed an excellent breakfast at Azur Lodge before getting picked up by a coach and transported to the very small town of Glenorchy, only about 250 residents or so we we...