Queenstown

Next morning we got up to head out of beautiful Wanaka to possibly even more beautiful Queenstown! Our first stop of the day was at a place called Puzzle World. Here, we were entranced by many puzzling things such as the leaning tower of Wanaka, a wooden maze which took an incredible amount of time and confusion to find ones way around in, a room tilted so water appeared to flow uphill, etc., a perspective room (see picture) and many other super neat optical illusions, etc..

The perspective room - look at how tall I am!!

Along the way, we stopped off at the birthplace of bungee jumping to hear its history and watch some sillies take a leap. We watched a video on the origin of the bungee idea - a tribe which used to do it without the elastic part of the rope to promote fertility - and its evolution and commercialization by a few crazy Kiwis who took elasticized the rope and took it all around the world to bridges and tall buildings before commercially setting it up in Queenstown. We watched one of our friends take the leap, and several others gracefully (or not) dive from the platform and bounce around upside down before being retrieved from dangling above the river by two expert fishermen in a boat - sweet as.
 

 

Queenstown itself had a strong resemblance to Whistler as a ski/resort town, but was a bit more spread out and diverse than Whistler. The town is nestled between a lake and some big hills which become mountains in the distance and was quite picturesque. Our first evening there we reveled in being in a somewhat bigger town and enjoyed shopping and exploring in the many gift shops for the afternoon/evening.

Queenstown

The next morning was an early start for a day trip to Milford Sound! It was a beautiful day in Queenstown, but as we headed towards Milford sound, the weather became more and more 'fiord-land-like'. We bundled up and enjoyed it anyways - I was toasty warm in a few sweaters, including one my mom had bought almost 19 years previous when my parents (and I) visited the sound - it returns, but I doubt it will hold together for another trip. The countryside for our bus ride was wrapped in mist, but was still quite beautiful with mountains and farmland changing to steeper mountains, lakes and untouched forest. When we got to Fiordland National Park, we could truly appreciate the wilderness of the area as we stopped to check out the sights. On a brief walk through the forest we were able to enjoy the rainforest and the multitude of mosses and incredible green of our surroundings - so mysteriously beautiful. The fiord landscape was shaped by glaciers over the ice ages and continues to be shaped today, but by water rather than ice. The gloomy weather we experienced illustrated this as the rain falling created thousands and thousands of waterfalls. I thought there were a lot as we drove through the hills to the Sound, but that was nothing compared to the number we saw when we were cruising along the Sound. We took a boat ride for a few hours into the Sound (which is technically a Fiord, but good luck fixing that now) to enjoy the amazing sights. There were steep cliffs and mountainsides on either side of the water and through the mist, the waterfalls were quite visible. Some were large and thundered down the banks, but others were small and swept up by the wind halfway down their course. It was difficult to keep track of scale as we cruised through, but many of the cliff faces and therefore waterfalls were up to 150m high! I loved watching the waterfall as we cruised up the Sound, turned around in the Tasman Sea, and cruised back down, catching a wee glimpse of some seals. The waterfalls and spectacular landscape stole the day though, and, while the pictures I took really don’t seem to do the area justice thanks to the mist, I'll just have to remember, and come back again some day! Oh yeah, and the mountains were crying, and every tear drop was a wa-wa-wa-wa-waterfall (Coldplay reference!).

Milford Sound. Pictures just cannot capture the scale and beauty

We topped off a great day with a trip to the renowned Ferg Burger shop where, of course, we ate a Ferg burger! Despite the wait, the burger was quite good, and it was a fun dinner out.

Ferging it up!

Conny and our other travelling friends all left Queenstown this morning, so I had a quiet day exploring solo again. Unlike ski-in Whistler, around Queenstown, you have to take a further bus up to the mountains to the ski fields, as snow in the town is not at all a permanent winter feature (when it snows in New Zealand, it's often only at high altitudes, rarely at sea level, and when it snows at the bases of mountains, it usually melts before too long, but it also helps that I've been enjoying New Zealand's warmest winter in 40 years)! So I decided that morning to get my fix of summer snow and go visit the ski fields. I chose the Remarkable field, and as I hoped, found it to be quite remarkable! The ski bus took about 45 minutes to get out of town and up the switchbacks to the top of the mountains. The view from the top of the mountains revealed way more snow peaked mountains than I had seen from the base or Queenstown, and some lovely looking ski conditions on the slopes. I wandered around, took some pictures of the scenery and enjoyed being surrounded in snow! (If only there had been a bus to the cross country ski fields… :() That afternoon, I returned to Queenstown, and hiked up the Tiki track which ran along the trail of the gondola in Queenstown. My climb was rewarded by a beautiful, free view of the city of Queenstown, the lake and the surrounding mountains, ahh how lovely. I just wish the towns along the West coast of New Zealand were a bit bigger and had more practical opportunities to live and work there… :)

The remarkable Remarkables.