Day 13 – Queenstown
Woke up to this view from my balcony:
Went for a walk around one small part of the lake:
Did a jetboat thing. Pretty expensive, but it was a decent length of time and followed two different rivers that feed into the lake. Left my bag, camera, phone in their office though.
Took a cable up to the top of one of the mountains.
They had this luge thing which was fab. I bought a package for the cable car and three rides on the luge. They’d had one in Rotorua also, but I’d skipped it, knowing that there was one here, too.
There are two tracks. You have to do the easier one for your first ride, but even that one was fun. The more difficult one was very cool: lots of tight turns and a few decent drops.
Not my video:
More of the view:
And back to the hotel:
I haven’t written much since the pictures sort of say it all, but I LOVED Queenstown. The town itself is only small, but the location is stunning and there’s loads to do. I only did the jetboat, cable car and luge, but there were a bunch of other boat trips, bungee jumping, skydiving, parasailing etc., so there’s easily enough to fill a few days, but it could get very, very expensive if you tried to do it all.
Day 14 – Milford Sound
I had another night in Queenstown, but had booked myself on a trip out to Milford Sound. It’s pretty far away, but the drive out there was stunning. As we got closer, it started absolutely pissing down though. We had a couple of stop offs on the way to look at s**t.
The sense of scale is really lost in most of these pictures, but everything was just absolutely enormous. Also, because it was pissing down, I gave up trying to use my proper camera since it was impossible to keep water off the lens, and mostly just used my phone.
While the rain was annoying, it meant that the scenery was loads better because of all the temporary waterfalls everywhere.
Once we hit Milford Sound, it was onto a boat. Pissing down, blowing a gale, soaked to the skin (most people just sat inside and looked out of the windows – why?), but amazing. Apart from a couple of big waterfalls, none of these would have been happening without the rain, and the bigger falls were obviously loads bigger than they would’ve been.
It was all a bit Jurassic Park and it was amazing. I’d had a couple of friends tell me that if you’ve seen a bunch of NZ scenery already, then Milford Sound isn’t worth the effort, but they’d done it on dry days, so it was nowhere near as dramatic.
A long day, piss-wet through for the whole journey back to Queenstown, but totally worth it.
CREDZ next.
Woke up to this view from my balcony:
Went for a walk around one small part of the lake:
Did a jetboat thing. Pretty expensive, but it was a decent length of time and followed two different rivers that feed into the lake. Left my bag, camera, phone in their office though.
Took a cable up to the top of one of the mountains.
They had this luge thing which was fab. I bought a package for the cable car and three rides on the luge. They’d had one in Rotorua also, but I’d skipped it, knowing that there was one here, too.
There are two tracks. You have to do the easier one for your first ride, but even that one was fun. The more difficult one was very cool: lots of tight turns and a few decent drops.
Not my video:
More of the view:
And back to the hotel:
I haven’t written much since the pictures sort of say it all, but I LOVED Queenstown. The town itself is only small, but the location is stunning and there’s loads to do. I only did the jetboat, cable car and luge, but there were a bunch of other boat trips, bungee jumping, skydiving, parasailing etc., so there’s easily enough to fill a few days, but it could get very, very expensive if you tried to do it all.
Day 14 – Milford Sound
I had another night in Queenstown, but had booked myself on a trip out to Milford Sound. It’s pretty far away, but the drive out there was stunning. As we got closer, it started absolutely pissing down though. We had a couple of stop offs on the way to look at s**t.
The sense of scale is really lost in most of these pictures, but everything was just absolutely enormous. Also, because it was pissing down, I gave up trying to use my proper camera since it was impossible to keep water off the lens, and mostly just used my phone.
While the rain was annoying, it meant that the scenery was loads better because of all the temporary waterfalls everywhere.
Once we hit Milford Sound, it was onto a boat. Pissing down, blowing a gale, soaked to the skin (most people just sat inside and looked out of the windows – why?), but amazing. Apart from a couple of big waterfalls, none of these would have been happening without the rain, and the bigger falls were obviously loads bigger than they would’ve been.
It was all a bit Jurassic Park and it was amazing. I’d had a couple of friends tell me that if you’ve seen a bunch of NZ scenery already, then Milford Sound isn’t worth the effort, but they’d done it on dry days, so it was nowhere near as dramatic.
A long day, piss-wet through for the whole journey back to Queenstown, but totally worth it.
CREDZ next.
