Queenstown: Did we bungee?!?! ..... No, it's far too scary!

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We drove all the way across the island to Te Anau that day and were greeted with miserable weather. Our plan was to stop briefly in Te Anau to get some information about cruises on Doubtful Sound and Milford Sound, and then head up the Milford Road to Milford Sound. Unfortunately as we walked to the i-Site, a notice on the door informed us that the Milford Road was closed. Great. Staff at the i-Site told us that there had been three landslips caused by a big electrical storm the night before that teams were trying to clear and that they were working 24 hours a day but the road was only due to open on Friday. It was only Wednesday. How frustrating...once again the weather had thwarted our plans. We were both pretty annoyed at the situation but eventually came up with a plan of action. Although Te Anau seemed like a nice enough little town, neither of us wanted to stay there, partially because we didn’t want to pay for a ‘real’ campsite because we are being tight-wads, but also because there wasn’t really anything going on there. We took to the road once more and headed out to Queenstown to spend a couple of days there before driving back down the same road to get to Te Anau and Milford Sound once the road was reopened.

The road was long and boring on the way to Queenstown until the last strip where we were driving along the side of a mountain with a lake far below us over the cliff edge. Even from a distance, Queenstown looked lovely and from up close, it was somewhere where both Matt and I could see ourselves living if it were not half a world away from the real home. A growing list of cities worldwide that we’d like to live in but probably never will ... a futile exercise really!

Queenstown is the most quaint little place, with lovely shops, small streets in the centre, beautiful lakes and absolutely stunning views of snow capped mountains, glistening lakes, forested mountains, and more. It really is incredibly beautiful. Yup, not a bad little place, and it’s full of skiing and snowboarding in the winter too, awesome. We arrived late the first night and went straight to the Twelve Mile Delta DoC campground for some more cheap camping. Queenstown is termed as the adrenalin capital of the world ... as it was where things like jet boating and bungee jumping were invented. So what was the first activity that we did in Queenstown? Went to the library of course, adrenalin junkies. We were only in the library to use their power sockets to charge our camera, so once we were done we headed off up a mountain to do a bit of luging! We paid for a ridiculously steep cable car ride to the top of the mountain perched immediately over Queenstown, ready to have a go on the luge-run (a bit like tobogganing but on concrete) but on the way up the cablecar we noticed that there was a bungee jump platform and couldn’t resist a quick voyeuristic look before we headed for our luge action. Now you have to understand that by NZ standards this bungee jump that we found ourselves stood in front of was only a baby, “just” a 47m drop (one of the ones in the valley is a 143m drop!) ... but the first time we watched someone jump I think it scared Cate and I as much as it scared the jumper. Of course, I say “jumper”, this poor girl had obviously realised in advance that when it came to standing on the edge of a 47m drop she wouldn’t have the willpower to jump of her own volition ... so we watched as the two members of staff picked her up from a crouched position and on the count of three they threw her out of the bungee platform. Why would anyone do that to themselves?!?!?! My heart was in my mouth, I felt the drop, I took a deep breath in...I am telling you that just watching someone falling like that pumped me with adrenaline. It was crazy. The second girl that we watched stood in the bungy station and looked like she was asking herself why she was putting herself through it. Then she took a run and fell over the edge, legs flinging all over the place. There is no way I would ever do that to myself, never.

We left the bungee station feeling slightly fearful, but went to do what we were there for - the luge. We had paid for five goes on the luge, the first ride of which has to be on the scenic ‘baby’ route rather than the ‘advanced route’. After being shown how to use the luge, I found myself going over bumps, turning corners suddenly, passing through narrow tunnels and chasing Matt down the track. The second time was even better as I went first and Matt was chasing me, then we rode by ourselves so that we could get pictures of each other. It was so much fun - at one point I went so quickly over the edge of a hill that my luge and I left the ground! In between each ride, we took the chair lift as we had to get back to the start of the course having travelled quite a distance downhill. This in its own right was a little scary at first as I had never sat in a chair so high off the ground, legs dangling, nothing to stop me falling out backwards if the chair lift rocked - I was being a bit of a wimp though as it was fine after the first or second time.

After collecting Bertha, we made our way to the lake where we parked the car and I went for a stroll along the beach. As I was there, I watched ducks surfing on the waves created by the lake and seagulls fighting for a scrap of what looked like chicken skin. As more and more seagulls realised that there was something to fight for, they flocked towards the beach and fought for their supper. It was like some sort of comedy sketch when a seagull attempted to pick the skin up and fly with it, others pecking at it and him as he went. He managed to fly only about a metre before dropping it and in an instant, a nearby duck swiped the skin and flew off across the lake, followed by all of the hungry seagulls - very clever duckie. What was even funnier was that another duck, the only animal left on the beach laughed out loud as soon as the duck and seagulls had flown away. It was very amusing - I am certain ducks do have humour and can actually laugh.

Enjoying the sunshine, the stunning views and whizzing down the side of a mountain on a little piece of plastic with wheels put us in a carefree enough mood to blow some money on eating out for the first time in New Zealand so we headed into town and did our age old trick of looking at ALL the options before making a decision, so after trawling through an inordinate amount of menus we plumped for a cheeky little gastro-pub character by the marina and chowed down on beef wellington and a juicy little steak, all sloshed down with a couple of pints of beer, soooo nice after not eating out for ages!

By the time we woke up the following morning the Milford Road was open again, so after a lazy morning in Queenstown we made the drive back to Te Anua to start heading out to Milford.

We travelled part way up the now open Milford Road and set up camp about 75km from Te Anue so that we wouldn’t have too much further to travel in the morning to get to our cruise on time. Along the road we saw hundreds of trees that had been knocked down in what we suspect must have been the recent storm and were reluctant to park Bertha under the cover of the camp trees so instead we were knocked from side to side by the howling wind throughout the night. The following morning we left early and continued up the Milford Road where we saw the huge landslips that had caused the road to close for days previously. The weather was pretty terrible, the clouds were very low and as we climbed up the mountain in Bertha, we found ourselves driving through the clouds. Waterfalls had appeared in most places that you looked with the amount of rain that had fallen in the past few days. We felt resigned to the fact that visibility might well be very poor on our cruise around Milford Sound but with a ‘yes’ mentality, we went along anyway. One cool part of the road is where the road literally cuts right through a mountain through a specially made tunnel. I’d never been through a mountain before! The mountains were snow capped, we took our first sight of a glacier in New Zealand and there were loads of glacial streams flowing and glacial moraine. On the way we stopped briefly to look at a chasm which we actually heard before we saw. It was an impressive sight...I’m still not really sure how it was created but basically it is a huge amount of water rushing into rocks in a river creating a deep channel,

Somehow as we made it to Milford Sound itself the clouds parted, the rain stopped ... and even a few rays of sunshine made an appearance through the cloud ... it seems the weather isn’t always against us after all. Pretty much the sole activity in Milford Sound (if you don’t fancy a 4 day hike) is to take a little cruise around the Sound (although it’s dubbed a Sound it’s actually a Fjord). So we used the BOGOF voucher that Jucy had furnished us with and off we went for a 90 minute cruise down the Sound to the ocean and back again. It’s a stunningly beautiful place, and I don’t doubt that if we hadn’t been lucky enough to have seen all the amazing sights we’ve seen recently that we’d have been totally awestruck. We spent the majority of the cruise right at the front of the ship, wrapped up nice and snug from the blowing wind, taking in all the scenery, looking (unsuccessfully) for dolphins and getting absolutely soaked when the ship went right up to the bottom of Stirling Falls. And that was Milford Sound - pretty, a bit like our trip at Halong Bay, worth having a look, although personally I enjoyed the sights that I saw on the road to Milford Sound more.

Matt and Cate x

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Photos

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After getting soaked by a waterfall on our Milford Sound cruise

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Milford Sound

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Ready to luge!!