Adventure Capital of the World

  Queenstown, New Zealand
Sunday, March 25, 2007

With our flight an hour late we had even less time at the Auckland airport to be processed through passport control and customs. Customs here is as stringent as Sydney and we seemed to have arrived at the same time as three other planes. An hour later we had been processed and had to reschedule our flight to Queenstown.

The Queenstown flight was uneventful until we went in for the landing. Queenstown is a city surrounded by mountains and the plane has to descend through a narrow valley to the runway. The mountains seemed very close! Luckily the pilots know how to steer it just right and we landed without incident.

Queenstown is a stunning town. We were very lucky to have blue skies which made it all the more beautiful. It sells itself as the adventure capital of the world and makes most of its money on tourism. 

Sunset

The streets are full of restaurants, bars, gift shops and companies selling tickets to do crazy things like bungy jumping, paragliding and sky diving. We did not sign up for any of these things. We spent the days walking around the town and the nearby parks.

One night a bagpipe band came to the harbour and played for spare change to help fund their club. The group was great and it was fun to see the crowd they attracted. Some may scoff at bagpipes but people really do enjoy hearing them play live. Lots of people put money in their pot. What set them apart was the young Japanese girl who played snare for the band (all bagpipers and the rest of the drummers were old white men). She was very good and was a big hit with the Asian tourists.

When we arranged to come to Queenstown we figured that our tour of the south island would start there. However, the campervan we ended up hiring (one that came with 4 seatbelts) had to be picked up in Christchurch, on the other side of the island. We looked at the hours of the rental office, the bus schedule to Christchurch and the arrival time of Mom and Dad. We realized that the only way to pick up the van on time without making Mom and Dad take a seven hour bus ride immediately after 22 hours of flights and layovers was for Julius to go there a day ahead of us.

Mom and Dad arrived in the afternoon and managed to stay up all day. I took them to most of the interesting places we saw the days before. The next morning we left the lodge and headed on the 15 minute walk to the downtown to catch the bus. Just at the end of our street we saw a bus parked by another hotel. As luck would have it, it was our bus. The people from the other hotel never did come out, but we were able to skip the walk and get the front seat on the bus with the best views. The driver was very interesting and talked about all the regions we were driving through. Mt Cook was even out that day. Before we knew it we were in Christchurch.