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Published: February 10th 2011
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Right now it's February 10th 2011 and my plan is to finish my travel blog that I didn't have time to finish / forgot about. It may be late, but it's definitely not forgotten!
My last blog saw me bungy jumping, lugeing and blindfolded bar crawling and now we are onto day six of Queenstown which started with a nice lie in.
When we finally got up Kish, Jess and I met up with Paul and Naomi to go watch Toy Story 3. Finally! I love that film and have seen it numerous times since then. It is truly an incredible trilogy that stretches right back to my childhood and still manages to excite me and make me laugh. Nice one Pixar.
Once it had finished, the others headed back to the hostel but I wanted to take a trip to the top of the cliff overlooking Queenstown on the gondola. It was a great place to get some picture and to be alone with my thoughts so I could reflect on what I had done thus far. Though I quickly became distracted by the crazy paragliders launching themselves off the top of the cliff, doing flips and spins all
the way down to a large, empty car park where they would land.
On our seventh day in Queenstown we headed to Milford Sound, a huge natural attraction with miles of mountains, forests and rivers leading out into the ocean. We had been told it was in the short list to become a natural wonder of the world but I am not sure if it has been successful. Kinda hope it will be though.
The bus trip into Milford took a number of hours, but we were entertained the majority of the way by our amazing bus driver who would play System of a Down's song 'Chop Suey' to wake everybody up and graced us with his abundance of jokes which included 'let's make like a shepard and get the flock out of here' and many, many variations of that.
The scenery became more and more beautiful the further we went, until we reached the dock where we would take a boat in between the mountains that were rising out of the sea. We were also taken to an underwater observatory which had a 360 degree viewing area where all manner of sea creatures could be seen. Nothing big,
but plenty of strange looking fish living among the coral that had started growing in these undersea plant pots.
After about half an hour we had to leave and caught the boat back to the dock. We stopped briefly at a small car park where we were greeted by a very bold young Kea bird. It had landed right near the door to the coach as if it expected a crowd of people to take photos of it. Probably trying to distract everyone long enough for its friend to sneak up behind someone and steal their food. It has happened before and would be pretty funny to watch. As long as it wasn't my food of course.
Our last day in Queenstown was upon us and FINALLY we get to go skiing. It had been two years since the last time I hit the slopes and both Kish and I were very excited. We took very few breaks and made the most of the one day we had by exploring all the off piste areas. The top of the mountain was definitely the best. Well you can't exactly ski once you reach the bottom, but more because it was
so high that we were skiing above the cloud line. It was also pretty interesting skiing down through the clouds as it got really hard to see and on multiple occasions I ended up on the moguls, struggling to stay upright. We had a good time and it brought back plenty of memories from our school ski trips, but from those memories we realised that the European Alps are still the place to be.
There is no doubt that I miss Queenstown a hell of a lot and would love to return one day, if only to eat another mouthwatering Fergburger. But it was time to move on and our next stop would be Christchurch. Again. We checked into Base and went to check out some of the things we missed when we were last there. First stop was the botanic gardens which was great to just walk around and unwind. The gardens were absolutely huge and contained all manner of plants, grand trees and decorative ponds. Soon after we got back to the hostel we met a young American girl named Bronwyn who invited us to join her at a comedy night in the nearby Civic Hall. We
headed to a pub first to grab a drink and I was amazed at how little I needed to open my mouth to have a conversation with the girl! I also learnt that teenagers in California love putting 'hella' in front of things as a sort of intensifier, so basically saying 'hella cool' or hella beer' instead of 'so cool' and loads of beer'. The comedy gig itself was pretty funny and the guys involved did a good job considering all their content was based on audience suggestion. We even won a free ticket to a ghost walk in the botanic gardens after making a good suggestion for a topic, though I decided to give it away in the end.
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Chris and Nikki
Chris
Great picture!