Chelle has finally relinquished control of the keyboard to me as she's still recovering from the last massive blog essay we did a couple of days ago - so here it is; the first blog a la Alex!

We left Wanaka on Saturday morning after a brief look around. There was a market on the park so we had a quick look around that and Chelle nearly got sucked into buying some cherries cos there was a cute kid offering tasters! My cousin Dan had suggested we drive from Wanaka to Queenstown via the Crown range on the High Cardrona valley road and stop off at the Cardrona Hotel (note it hasn't burnt down Dan!). From the outside the hotel looks pretty tiny but inside it's really nice and has a massive beer garden at the rear, so we stopped for a quick replenishment!

When we got to the top of the Crown range we got our first view of Queenstown, which was pretty spectacular! We spent the rest of the day wandering around Queenstown preparing ourselves for the onslaught of activities booked for the following day. After pizzas at the Cow restaurant (funny location, great pizzas!) we headed to Arrowtown where our camp ground was for the next couple of days.

After a glorious day on Saturday we woke to rain on Sunday - I couldn't convince Chelle they stopped bungee jumping when it rained so she made me drive out to the Kawarau Bridge for my jump! It was amazing! I was pretty nervous but asked for the full works so they lengthened the cord to ensure I got fully dunked in the river! It was awesome!

After lunch we both got picked up for our rafting of the Shotover river. This included a very scary trip along a gravel road the old gold miners built in the 1800's (no engineering company would undertake the job so they had to do it themselves!) in a rickety old bus. It followed what can only be described as a sheer drop down a mountain side to the Shotover river - we were told this is the 15th most dangerous road in the world (ranked by the American AA)! As we were definitely not keen to take the bus back we decided we should go rafting! And it was great fun - we tackled some pretty huge grade 3-4 rapids and a narrow, dark tunnel blown by miners! Chelle got really into it as you can see from the photos (whilst I spent most of my time with my eyes shut she was giggling all the way down!).

We're now about to leave Queenstown for Te Anau - our base for our Milford Sound trip!