Our South Island Adventure - Here we come Queenstown

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So it's now an early morning drive to Queenstown. We had overheard that it was a beautiful drive but we were not so quite prepared as how beautiful it really was. It was a beautiful drive through rolling hills. I ended up taking hundreds of pictures.

Here we are Queenstown

So unlike most our plan here in Queenstown was not to do some adrenalin junkie activity as most. We kind of traded in doing Doubtful Sound for that as we wanted to see as much as possible of the South Island and anyway you can do these activities pretty much anywhere in the world right. That and the cost of these activities are tremendously exorbitant! It does not take long to realise though that that is really the only reason to come to Queenstown as most of the shops is about booking an activity. It appears to be a town built for the tourists but thankfully it is set by a beautiful lake and there are plenty of bars and restaurants to keep one entertained.

We started our experience of Queenstown by heading to catch the gondola to check out those city and mountain views talked about. They have what they call a luge which you can do and there were many people taking part in such said activity but I am afraid that we even declined to do that. Frankly I did not get the point of it but whatever floats your boat right. The views were spectacular and worth going up for and we did a short walk as well to view Ben Lomond (named by Scottish settlers who for some reason were missing home). We stopped for lunch at an Irish pub in town (there are many in New Zealand by the way) and I had a huge burger that appeared like it would fill me up for the next few weeks. After we went for our usual city walk to soak up the city which I must admit does not take that long to do so it was not before long that we found ourselves relaxing having a coffee which was not such a bad thing after all our usual busy days. They did have some lovely gallery's and shops selling Maori arts and crafts by local artists. Then it started to rain! It was a rush to get back to the camper so as not to get soaked.

It was an uneventful evening after that and unfortunately the camp site we were staying in was a bit dismal as well. Our overall impression of Queenstown was not favourable and we kept wondering if we should have really spent the night here or just to move on. It was an opportunity to rest and rejuvenate though before we started our journey along the West Coast to see the Glaciers.

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