Halfway round

  Queenstown, New Zealand
Saturday, January 27, 2007

After the heart-stopping excitement of Christchurch, on to the self-styled adventure capital of the world, Queenstown. Certainly it's heritage for excitement is fairly impressive - it was here the AJ Hackett invented Bungy Jumping and it was also here that jet boats were developed.

Here also marks almost exactly the halfway point in my trip, not only in time, but geographically. I've been away for 3 ½ months and have a similar amount of time to go before I head home. Additionally, using the impressive Google Earth, I figured out that I'm currently 11,796 miles from home - the farthest point on my journey. From now on, every trip I take, takes me closer to home - bugger!

Going back to Queenstown, of course, it now has an even bigger claim to fame than it's adventure credentials, for it is here and the surrounding area that large chunks of Lord of the Rings was filmed - in other words, welcome to Middle Earth! It's now also becoming a place for US "A" list stars to buy holiday homes, drawn by the beauty, tranquillity and, er, not the weather. Amongst others, Steven Spielberg, Shania Twain, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods have built or are building homes here - indeed Messrs Woods and Nicklaus are currently building a luxury golf resort about 10km outside of Queenstown, on, ironically enough, Jack's Point (named after Maori Jack, whoever he was!). So, all in all, rather impressively for a town of 14,000 permanent residents, Queenstown is rapidly becoming one of the world's tourist hotspots

Queenstown from the air

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The visitor profile to this place is rather weird. For years it's tourist economy was based almost entirely on backpackers - supplemented by the wealthier tourists using the place as a stopping off point for the Fjords, Glaciers, etc. However, since LOTR (as it's referred to round here), there's been an explosion in package tours offering the opportunity to see some of the stunning scenery portrayed in the film. Hence the very large number of tour buses pulling in and depositing camera wielding Japanese tourists into this rather small town. One of the problems this is causing for the backpackers is the prices in the shops and restaurants have jumped in the past couple of year as locals, understandably, cash in on the place's new found fame. The guide on our rafting trip was complaining that business has really dropped for them in the past couple of years as backpackers find their budgets rapidly being eaten up by the cost of living, with the inevitable need to save on one or two activities. Conversely, the guys I did Quad biking

A dirty but happy me, Quad Biking

with had branched out into taking 4x4 tours round the LOTR sights and are raking it in as they overcharge tour groups for a 2 hour drive round some of the locations.  

So, did I do a bungy, I hear you cry? No, I reply - I've done two, hated it both times and saw no reason to see if the experience would improve here. Instead, I contented myself with some river rafting down the Shotover River, a quad bike tour of some of the valley's round here, a jet-boat trip back down the Shotover

The Shotover River

, a round of golf on, officially, the 7th most scenic golf course in the world and finally and most spectacularly, a flight down to Milford Sound. I think a few times in this trip, I've mentioned stunning scenery, but wow - this is something else. The flight goes over the main mountain range of the South Island and some of the views down the valley's really do take your breath away. I've put a few pics of the flight up, so I'll let them tell their own tale.

Moving on from Queenstown, I headed toward a little town called Te Anau, the gateway to Milford Sound, this time in a car for some more diving. The drive down was no less spectacular than the flight, with the same scenery, this time from ground level - it's actually quite dangerous driving as every time you go round a corner you're confronted by more beautiful views and your attention wanders away from the road! Quite a number of car manufacturers use the roads round here for shooting ads and it's easy to see why - if your car looks crap, use great scenery to distract the viewers attention!

So anyway, back to Te Anau - a nice little place on Lake Te Anau. It's major attraction are some glow worms in a cave and the lake itself, which is the biggest on the South Island.  The glow worms do indeed glow and are in a cave - which is nice. The lake is very big and inevitably, pretty. And that's Te Anau.

So, then back to Milford Sound and time for a geography lesson. Milford Sound is named after Milford Haven in Wales - named by the first skipper to find the inlet, who was from Milford Haven - inevitable really. After a few years it was renamed Milford Sound, but this is actually an incorrect name. A Sound is created by the sea flooding into a river created valley. However, Milford was created by glacial action, hence, it is actually a fjord. Which isn't that interesting really. But the place is - when you're in a little dive boat going down the fjord, the sheer scale of the cliffs

Milford Sound

  either side leave you feeling rather small. It has the second highest waterfall in the world (behind Angel Falls in Venezuela) and, more impressively, the highest sea cliff in the world at a staggering 800metres - which is rather a long way up, especially when you're looking up from the bottom. One other notable fact about Milford is the rain - on average it receives a staggering 280 inches of rain a year. To put that in perspective, the wettest place in the UK is Mount Snowdon which gets 180 inches a year - London gets 23 - so stop moaning about the rain! What makes diving

Diving in Milford Sound

here unique is that there's a freshwater layer of around 3 metres above the sea water. Because the fresh water is flowing from the hillsides and rivers, as well as from the sky, it tends to be very dirty as it's picked up soil and tree waste on the way down. The net effect of this is the light penetrating through to the saltwater is the equivalent to a depth of about 50 metres, giving you the opportunity to see marine life that normally wouldn't be seen in normal diving conditions. As Milford is also a marine park, animals such as the crayfish can grow much larger than they normally would if they were in a fishing zone - this chap was genuinely huge

A permanent resident of Milford Sound

. The most impressive thing on the dive is the Black Coral - huge fans of, ahem, white coral  that are hundreds of years old (the reason it's called Black Coral is when it's taken out of the water and dies, it turns black - it's then frequently made into jewellery).

Next stop the Glaciers of the South Island.

Rob