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After recovering from our trek we made our way to Queenstown and were excited to witness this famous adrenaline fuelled town. Queenstown is well known for offering every possible activity imaginable mainly bungee jumping and sky diving in the day whilst also offering a good bar scene at night. On the day we arrived we did a sky dive and I can't quite believe I did it! It was lucky we did it the day we did because on the following days, it poured with rain non-stop and Queenstown had more rainfall in 2 days than it had had for the whole year. Before the sky dive i was petrified and I had to calm my nerves with a couple of Vodka's but as we were flying up in the plane, i had a calm feeling about me. It was a kind of, 'well, if i'm going to die, i'm going to die, I can't do anything about it now' kind of feeling. My tandem master was constantly joking with me, saying he was tired and keeps lacking in concentration which I pretended to laugh at, although quite sarcastically. As he strapped me to him and we bum shuffled towards the
door of the plane I looked down at the ground through the clouds 12,000 feet below me and, to be honest, i wasn't nervous, I think i actually stopped feeling anything. He pushed me out of the plane and we plummeted to the ground at 200 kph. For the first few seconds, i felt a stomach-in-the-air feeling but after that you don't even feel like you're really falling, especially not at 200kph. It's impossible to really scream or shout for a long time as your mouth completely dries up and you need to breathe through your nose or you won't be able to breathe at all. But it was totally awesome and although rather expensive, it was worth every cent. Although I wasn't really concentrating on the scenery until the parachute opened after 45 seconds of free fall, an aerial view of the surrounding mountains was certainly a stunning feature of the fall. I would definitely recommend this to anyone!
After recovering from the skydive and looking through our pictures a number of times, we went out in the evening to witness the Queenstown scene which was actually good fun. We stayed a couple of days here and went
luging too which was great and I pretended I was Lewis Hamilton. After Queenstown, we went to Puzzling World in Wanaka which is an exhibition of optical illusions and a big maze (which we gave up on) before heading up the west coast to see the famous glaciers. The west coast is renowned to be pretty desolate with no mobile phone signal for the majority of the way and not many people around for miles and miles. The weather can also be very changeable due to it being very mountainous, so it's colder and wetter than other parts of New Zealand. We were still lucky with the weather though and had a beautiful sunny day for climbing the glaciers. Our first stop was at Fox Glacier which we saw from a distance before heading to Franz Josef glacier and booking an all day glacier hike for the following day. The glacier hike was a great experience. We were given cramp-ons and climbed across the ice, through deep crevices and even through some cavities that had formed naturally. It was like being in an ice bar but without the alcohol. The ice looked very blue in parts, appearantly due to the
refraction of light, and from a high point it looked stunning. It was quite hard work as for each step we made, we had to make sure we had good grip on the ice. It was even harder for the guides though as they had to carve the path with a pick-axe in front of each group.
After the glacier hike and having a few drinks in Franz Josef town, the following day we made our way via pancake rocks which are some strange rocks which have some strange, unexplained layering before heading towards Hanmer Springs where we visited the hot pools, some of which were sulphurous, and spent a few hours trying to relax. However, due to it being Easter weekend, the pools were packed and the idea of relaxing was just an idea as screaming kids were running around everywhere! After spending Easter day having a few drinks in Hanmer Springs we made our way back to Christchurch to give the van back before heading back up to Kekerengu in the Marlborough region to do some waitressing.
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