30th November 2009
Queenstown is surrounded by the soaring heights of the Remarkables mountain range and the meandering coves of Lake Wakatipu, but is mostly famous for being NZ’s adventure capital, dreaming up ever more weird and wonderful ways for you to throw yourself off stuff and interact with your (albeit spectacular) environment.
Unfortunately, we’ve had another cloudy and fairly cold day today for our trip to Queenstown, so initially the views of the mountain ranges were shrouded from view by the low cloud.
Queenstown’s centre is compact and very easy to walk around, so we parked up the campervan and headed for the town centre. It was full of ways to spend money, and I’m not simply talking about shopping, but bungy jumping, quad biking, walking tours, paragliding, skydiving. You name it, you can buy it. This is kind of what we had expected and we had already decided that we didn’t want to do any of the ’thrill’ stuff here since you tend to pay a premium simply because it is Queenstown.
We headed for the Skyline Gondola for a ride up the mountain for some fabulous views of Lake Wakatipu and the Remarkables. Ordinarily we may have been tempted by the luge, but being so high up also made it colder so we settled for the views and a coffee in the cafe at the top. We were hoping to see someone (silly people) do a bungy, but tourist season is obviously still getting going here because there were no takers while we were at the top. We did however see someone tandam paragliding, which looked like a really relaxing way to take in the scenery and may be an option for later on in our trip.
After taking the Gondola back down to street level, we headed out to find a lakeside spot for a warming lunch. We were lucky enough to find somewhere away from the crowds (there are loads of coaches and campervans around Queenstown).
We felt we had seen enough of Queenstown, so tonight we are staying about 40kms south of it in a small township called Kingston which is right on the lake on the opposite side to Queenstown. Tomorrow we head for Manapouri where we have booked a cruise on Doubtful Sound for Wednesday.
