After the fun of the glaciers we headed for the adventure capital of the Southern Hemisphere- Queenstown. Here you can raft, bungy, sky dive, quad bike, mountain bike, river surf and generally throw yourself off things to your hearts content! The drive there was particularly nice, plenty of beautiful countryside with huge mountains still in the background. We drove through mount Aspiring National Park and pas plenty of lakes with really blue water- in fact you get a bit sick of it all after a while!

We arrived in the evening and headed for the camp sit which turned out to be really crowded- there was a particularly annoying group ogf lads who thought they were particularly cool- listening to the Police and jungle music (nice combo eh?) at particularly load levels. Anyway they shut up eventually!

We took a walk around that evening and found that QT was quite a nice place- very much a tourist town but it sat on the lake with the hills looking down over it. Next day we went and booked our white water radfting for the day after. We didn´t quite manage to book a bungy despite my efforts at persuasion and i didn´t want to do it alone!! So we went and had a drive up to the Shotover river and watche the jet boating whilst we had our lunch. We´d decided to stay at a different campsite- a Dept of Conservation one- which was right on a lake. We went for a swim befoer chilling out for the evening- qwuite a relaxed day for the city of adventure eh??

Next day we rose early and headed off to do our white water rafying. WE met i town and then headed off on a coach to the strating point. This involved a drive on one of the most notorious roads in NZ- Skippers Road. It was built as an access track to the old gold mines down by the river and is literally a ledge about the width of a car, with a drop off of around 100-200metres on one side- you really put your trust in the driver. Strange thing is its speed limit is 100kmh- not sure anyone had ever got up to 50 let alone that!!

Before long we were on the river- kitted out in water proof suits, life jackets, helmets which made us look like idiots!! We grabbed a paddle and we were off. The river started slowly at first but some built up to some quite good rapids. At one point the instructor fell right over and landed on Tom which was a little painful. The finale was a trip through a 100 metre tunnel and then a big rapid which was pretty cool. All in all it did feel a little tame though- even for Maria! Perhaps we have got used to danger and we need more to get our kicks these days!!

We decided that we were off and so we headed out of QT and on with the journey...