Queenstown and Great Lakes

  Queenstown, South Island, New Zealand
Monday, May 25, 2009

25.05.09:Time to leave beautiful Milford Sound...under the sun! We drove through "the Alps".  It seems that Australians and Kiwis like to steal the European names for mountains. It is not the first time we see "Alps" and we even saw "the Pyrenees" in Australia! the windy roads have beautiful views. We went through the Omer tunnel in the mountain, which looks pretty scary. It looks like they just dug a hole and that was it. No concrete inside apart from the road. I am sure it looked just the same 100 years ago.

Sean and the giant kiwi

We stopped every other kilometre to take photos. We just cant stop. Sean is a real Japanese at heart. We stopped next to a bus full of Nippons and Sean went into the bushes to climb on rocks on the river to take "the money shot" and they were just following him! It was so funny. I even saw one Japanese taking a close up of a bit of snow! There are loads of parrots in the area. Keas are the only alpine parrots in the world. They are mean as well, they steal stuff and wreck your belongings. We saw a couple on the car park who was changing their tire after the bloody bird picked its beak through the rubber and burst it!!

Diamond lake

We continued driving and got stuck in a small village because of cows. There were loads of them. We decided that we had to go through and pushed our way through the beasts. Good idea we did that because the fleet was a couple of km long! We finally arrived in Kingstown, at the beginning of lake Wakatipu. This is a huge lake surrounded b y mountains that goes all the way to Queenstown. We loved that town!!! It is so cute. We expected to be much bigger, actually (Le centre ville est aussi grand que Thionville, sauf que personne ne connait Thionville et tout le monde connait Queenstown....étrange) It is a small ski station, actually, much to our surprise. The slopes are opening on June 6th. It is so strange to see all the shops getting ready to sell snowboards and ski wear!! It took us ages to do our laundry...many problems with the dryers, I thought I would smash the machines!!! Thankfully, the staff was good about it and gave us a free drying and extra!

Sylvan lake

26.05.09: We drove around on the other side of lake Wakatipu to discover more of the region. Some of the scenes of Lord of the Rings were filmed around Glenorchy. We loved that road towards Paradise and the beautiful Diamond lake. But Oh so cold!!! This area has been the coldest so far!! We went for a walk tin the forest near Sylvan lake. Good exercise, especially when there was a river and no way to get through it.

Finished walking, Can I have a glass of wine, now?

We had to back track and climb on a slippy trunk to get on the other side! And my poor jeans who just cleaned the previous night with much hassle were dirty again!! Arrgh. We were supposed to go to Wanaka, but decided to stay in Queenstown another night has it was getting dark on our way back from our walk!