Hi there,
Well... true to our word here is your weekly update! I wonder if we'll manage to keep it up?!
Andy went over our experience up Fox Glacier last week - that was such a magical moment for us both, especially as we got the best of the sun that day and the colours around us were simply stunning. I have uploaded a few pictures for you to see. Today's picture is of Queenstown which was our next stop.
It didn't take us long to drive from Wanaka to Queenstown which gave us most of the day exploring our new destination. We booked ourselves into a campsite which was situated just beneath the Gondalas and overlooking Lake Wakatipu (as pictured above). We had quite a nice little spot for the two stinkies and once we were sorted we started to explore the town. As the weather was so lovely we decided to go up the gondalas to get a view over the whole town and the lake..... it was such a fantastic view and the lake was an amazing vibrant blue.... very inviting! The gondola itself took us up a very steep hill through an Alpine forest which was a little scary if you looked down!
We decided not to participate in the luge at the top and instead headed back down into the town. Queenstown has a few really lovely streets that we enjoyed wandering along and looking about. We did a little bit of Christmas shopping before popping into a tour operators to book ourselves onto a jet boat ride the following day....I wasn't up for jumping out of a plane and this was the least adventurous activity we could do here! Following on from the tour operators we passed a sign for happy hour which was starting just as we walked past..... coincidence? We thought not and sat outside in the sunshine drinking a few beers to cool us down before heading back to the campsite. We then sat outside the tent surrounded by leaflets trying to decide where we wanted to go after Queenstown and what we should do next. We had a lovely evening just planning our adventures over a glass or 2 of local wine until it got too dark to sit outside.
The next day, we made our way to the meeting point for out trip to the Shotover River ready for our boat ride. We got a bus through Skippers Canyon, which I have to say was far scarier than the boat ride itself. It was a single track road with a very long drop over the edge (the bus driver actually made a point of saying to us if anyone suffers from vertigo then not to look over the right hand side of the bus!) - I wasn't too keen on looking over the edge although the views were pretty outstanding. It wasn't so much fun when we came head to head with another vehicle though!
We got to the river's edge without too much trouble and were handed our life jackets. After a quick safety briefing, i.e. do not put your hands outside of the boat! we were away and heading hell for leather down the Shotover River. We must have been travelling at about 85km/ph around bends and over rapids, past rocky outcrops and around crags and boulders along the edges . We also did a number of 360 turns which got us all really wet! It was pretty good fun although not the nail biting experience that I was expecting... maybe I'm getting braver?!
Once back on dry land we were taken to an old bridge that the miners used to cross the river. This area used to be full of miners mining for gold... there was lots of it along the riverbed.
After returning through Skippers Canyon and back into the town we got back to Stinky and headed off in the direction of Te Anau, our next stop. Te Anau was just an overnight stay and wasn't particularly exciting although the campsite was rather nice and we got to sit outside at a table next to our tent until the sun set.
We had booked ourselves onto an overnight cruise on the Doubtful Sound starting the next day so were resting up after our boat excitement ready for the next adventure - exploring the Fiordland of New Zealand. We'll update you on that next week!
Bye for now, V & A Xx