Joining the throngs of tourists in Queenstown

Both of us had last week off work, so we took an escape to the South Island. First stop: Queenstown. Situated on the shore of lake Wakatipu, in the south-central part of the South Island, Queenstown is also known as 'Banff on Steroids'. Similar to Banff, Queenstown is a mountain resort with an active nightlife, and just as many (possibly more) multicultural tourists. It is also the unofficial (possibly even official) adventure capital of New Zealand, hence the 'steroids' reference. You really can't visit Queenstown without doing something extreme, or you will most likely be regarded as an extremely boring person. Extreme activities include skydiving (more on that later), bungee jumping, jumping into a canyon on a massive swing, and white water rafting. We decided to be somewhat unadventurous (Emma's influence) and settled on doing some hiking and white water rafting during our time there.

On day 1, we decided to climb Ben Lomond peak, a mountain that overlooks Queenstown and can be accessed easily from the central city. We started by taking a gondola up to the top of Queenstown hill (the South Island's answer to Vancouver's Grouse Mountain), the base of which was about a 10 minute walk from our hotel. We knew that it was lazy of us to take the gondola, but the hike takes almost 6 hours if you walk up the gondola, and we had decided that going for a leisurely brunch was far more important than allowing for adequate time to do the entire hike. The gondola trip shaved about 45 minutes off our hike time.

We attempted the hike on a fairly dreary day, but we were still able to get some nice views. The walk started out through a pine forest, which was very reminiscent of our prior hiking in Canada. The forest was even home to a plethora of massive toadstools. Emma thought that it seemed like an enchanted forest. Justin thought that it seemed like a normal forest, and that the toadstools should be referred to as mushrooms because they were unlikely to be large enough for toads to use as stools. For some perspective (this toadstool was lying in the middle of the trail, we didn't pick it): 

While we're on the topic of enchanted forests, one of Justin's favourite movies (but he pretends it's not), Willow, was actually filmed in Queenstown.

It took an hour or so to make it up on the ridge leading towards the summit of the Ben Lomond peak. Once on the ridge, we were treated to some great views of the NZ mountains.

From the other direction, we were able to get a good view of Queenstown and lake Wakatipu.

After a bit of scrambling we made it up to the summit just as the clouds cleared off a bit. Some friendly Aussies were nice enough to take our picture.

The highlight for Justin was getting to see some of the local wildlife up close and personal. Unfortunately, the goat was not particularly photogenic.

We made it back to central Queenstown in time to catch the sunset.

The next morning, we headed out for some white water rafting on the Shotover river. Emma had never been  rafting before, and was a little bit nervous about the brochure's promise of class 5 rapids. Her anxiety was not alleviated when the rafting guides started to give instructions about what to do if the raft were to capsize, and telling everyone to 'by no means try to stand up in the river if you fall out of the raft or you'll almost certainly drown'. It didn't help that, while this safety briefing was going on, they were driving us in a bus down the most dangerous road in New Zealand. This road, which transports you into part of the Shotover river valley called Skipper's Canyon, was initially used by gold miners to get access to the river. Now, because the road is so dangerous, public use is not permitted, and bits of the road are known to crumble off into the river from time to time. Pictures don't really do it justice, but as you can see, it's quite a narrow road.

Anyway, back to the rafting. We actually made it through the experience relatively unscathed (Emma hit Justin with her paddle once, accidentally of course), and the raft did not capsize. This was all despite the fact that half of the others in our raft didn't understand english and hence couldn't react properly to our guide's paddling commands. We don't have any photos of the rafting experience, so we figure that we'll have to go again sometime, and now Emma will be confident enough to try and bring her waterproof camera.

The Queenstown region (part of central Otago) is known for its pinot noir, so we decided we had better do at least a little bit of wine tasting during our time there. We headed out to the Gibbston Valley, which hosts a number of vineyards, and rented some bikes. 

We were able to get to three different wineries in an afternoon: Peregrine, Remarkables, and Gibbston Valley. The latter has New Zealand's largest wine cave, which offers tours as well as tastings. Justin started to get some ideas for his future wine-making endeavours. Looks like we're going to need a big property with a cave when we move back to Canada!

The next leg of our trip was spent in Milford Sound. More to come on that soon.