When you think of fun and adventure in New Zealand, your mind should think Queenstown and rightly so. It’s amazing. We absolutely loved it here. It’s our new favourite place. The whole town is surrounded by breathtaking scenery, there is so much to do in and around the town and the whole place is just so friendly. It was great!!
We drove into Queenstown from Te Anau so that we were ready to look around and enjoy from lunch time on our first day. The weather was brilliant so we decided to grab a dominos pizza deal, eat our pizza overlooking Lake Wakatipu and then have a game of frisbee golf. Yes, you read that correctly, frisbee golf. I’ve seen a frisbee golf course before at Mount Edgcumbe, but we’d both never had a go before. We hired our frisbees from a local sporting goods shop and headed to Queenstown Gardens to see what it was like.
The whole course was 18 holes, but the first couple of holes were placed next to a steep hill down to the lake. A couple of times our frisbees went rolling down towards the hill lake and we thought we’d lost them, but luckily not. I decided relatively soon that I wasn’t very good at frisbee golf. I had the odd hole where it went ok and I hit par, but in general I couldn’t get the distance and the course was full of trees. It was great fun and Simon was crowned victorious at the end. Well done 🙂
After our game of frisbee golf we were headed to a small town just outside of Queenstown called Arrowtown. We were going to stay there for the night, not just because of our visit to the town, but also because it was cheaper to stay in Arrowtown that Queenstown. Arrowtown is a typical gold mining town, which is made up of lots of old heritage buildings. It has a really lovely Western feel to it and during our time here we walked along the Arrow river, around the Chinese settlement (there were a lot of Chinese people that came over to work in the gold mines) and through the actual town. We enjoyed a drink at one of the cafes and just relaxed which was lovely.
The next day we were heading to Arthurs Point so that we could ride the Shotover Jet. We have heard that there are 3 things you have to do whilst in Queenstown: Ride the Shotover Jet, Eat a Fergburger and Do a bungy jump (more on these later). In 2014 Prince William and Kate had a ride on the Shotover, so if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for us too. The ride was going to be about 25 minutes and the jet boat was going to take us along the Shotover river, taking us very close to the canyon walls, spinning us 360 degrees and zooming us through a couple of inches of water. The whole experience was brilliant and really exciting. We came off pretty wet, but was so glad we’d done it.
After this we headed back over to Queenstown. Our holiday park was really kind in letting us park the car there for the day free of charge so that we could get on with exploring before checking in. We were going to go on the free walking tour at 10am to get some insider info on the town. Our tour guide was called Jordan and he was full of knowledge about the history of the town and the different stages it has gone through. It was really interesting to learn that the town was initially colonised by a Maori tribe, then 2 men European men, then the city boomed for the gold rush and now is going through a tourist trade boom. There are 20,000 people who are permanent residents of Queenstown and 10,000 people working there on working visas from around the world. We definitely saw the appeal of Queenstown and could hear British accents everywhere we turned.
Our walking tour took us around the town and allowed us to have a cookie sample at Cookie Time and a Beer sample at a locals pub. We got to see the famous Earnslaw steamer boat leaving for its tour and learnt about the Maori origin story of Lake Wakatipu.
“At the heart of the legend is Manata, the beautiful daughter of a local Maori chief, who was forbidden to marry Matakauri, the man she loved.One night, Manata was kidnapped by a fierce giant from the mountains named Matau. The chief was so distraught about his daughter that he promised Manata’s hand in marriage to the man from the tribe who could rescue her. Matakauri snuck into Matau’s lair under cover of darkness and rescued Manata, and the two were happily married at last.But Matakauri wanted to be sure that Matau would never threaten his wife or tribe again, so he once again stole away into the mountains. He found Matau asleep, curled up on his giant side. Matakauri set fire to him, burning him where he lay. The fire burned a deep gouge into the earth and caused the ice and snow on the surrounding mountains to melt — forming Lake Wakatipu. The name translates to “Hollow of the Giant.”” Taken from http://www.dangerous-business.com/2011/03/the-maori-legend-of-lake-wakatipu/
Having lived in a house called Wakatipu for the first 18 years of my life it was really interesting to hear this story about this beautiful lake. In fact, Lake Wakatipu was formed from a glacier around 15,000 years previously. I prefer the Maori story.
After the walking tour Simon was booked in to have a go on an activity called Hydro Attack. Unfortunately, this was cancelled due to high winds. Don’t worry though, we’ll come back to this. Instead we decided to do the Queenstown Hill walk up to the Basket of Dreams and a wonderful view of the town. Before this though, I needed to try a deep fried Kiwi that our walking tour guide told me about. It was very tasty, but super hot inside. Back tot the walk though. I’m not going to lie… this walk was hard. I don’t think I would normally struggle this much on this walk, but for some reason I was having a hard time and developed a pretty bad headache about half way up. We took it slow and made it to the top. This was my favourite viewpoint of the whole trip so far. The whole area is just breathtaking and the town had already stolen our hearts. Reluctantly we headed back down and back to the our holiday park to get checked in.
Tonight was the night that we were going to hit the second must do on the Queenstown bucket list. Fergburger. I am not a massive burger eater, but Simon absolutely loves them. I ordered a Tropical Swine and Simon a Big Stuff. The queue at Ferburger can get massive at all times of the day (the store is open from 8.30am to 5am the next day – crazy) and we’d learnt a trick to phone your order in and then collect from the hut. It worked a treat and we had our burgers in 15 minutes compared to the usual hour plus wait. We walked down to the waterfront and tucked in. We both agreed that these were the best burgers we’d ever had in our lives. They were just amazing! Jucy, tasty and huge!! I think we’d move to Queenstown just for the Fergburgers.
As we had well and truly stuffed ourselves we headed back to Queenstown Gardens and went for a walk to digest. From here we had some great views over to Deer Park Heights which is where they filmed some scenes from Wolverine and also the large Orc fight when the Rohan people were leaving Helms Deep in the LoTR. There was live music playing in some of the bars and the atmosphere in town was great. Such a lovely day.
The next day I turned 28 years old and I was so happy to be spending it in this town. I’m sure you’re all getting fed up of me saying how much we like places, but honestly I truly mean it about this place. There are only 3 other places I would have liked to have been as much and that was Magnetic Island, Fraser Island or Noosa in Australia. Queenstown is still my favourite though. We woke up and our first activity of the day was a fry up. I’ve been going on about how we probably wont get fry ups easily in S.E. Asia so we found ourselves a fry up before heading up Bobs Peak on the gondala for some luging.
Andy, Jonny and Simon will tell you that my previous experience of luging was somewhat disastrous. I ended up zooming off a mountain into a pile of snow about 1 foot away from a tree whilst in France skiing a few years back. Luckily, this didn’t happen again. This time there was no snow, just some go kart like carts and 2 pretty awesome tracks. We had another bookme deal which included our gondala ride and also 7 runs down the luge. The gondala ride was brilliant and gave us good views back over the lake. I was pretty eager when we got to the top though and wanted to get straight on with luging.
We had to prove that we could luge to start with and had a practice with one of the instructors. We passed with flying colours and went down the blue track first (easier). Over the course of our next 7 runs we did a mix of the blue and red runs (mainly red which was a bit faster and bendier). They were both brilliant and we had a lot of fun laughing and enjoying ourselves. After luging we enjoyed the views at the top of Bobs Peak and watched a few people jump of the ledge bungy.
We headed back down Bobs Peak and back into town. We had a few hours before our next activity so we went back to the locals pub we had the beer tasting the day before and enjoyed a cocktail in a teapot. Yummy! The sun was shining and the day was just perfect. After this we were heading to the Absolute Zero Ice Bar. We had managed to get a deal on entry and a cocktail each, but I have to admit I didn’t have high expectations for the whole experience. Neither of us had ever been in an ice bar so were pleasantly surprised by the whole experience. We were bundled up in a warm coat and gloves and headed in to a room filled with beautiful ice sculptors, an ice sleigh, a hockey table made of ice and an ice fireplace. The whole bar was made of ice, our glasses were made of ice and there was a photobooth. It was sooooo cool!
Our next stop was dinner on the lake at the Bath house. The views were just perfect, the food even better (beef for me and venison for Simon). This day just kept getting better and better. But, then it just went above and beyond. Finally it was time for my birthday present from Simon. We were going to spend an hour in a private hot pool at Onsen hot pools over looking the Shotover River. We had sparkling wine, ice cream and an incense burner. Bliss!! Especially as we got to watch the sunset over the mountains. We both came away so relaxed and had a lovely nights sleep that night.
We had one more day in Queenstown and this was the day that I’d been worrying about for days. It was time for Simon to do the Nevis Bungy. He would be throwing himself off a suspended platform and falling for 134m. Lucky me, I got the fun of watching from the platform. He was super chilled out about it all the whole time and loved it. He did it twice!!!! Now, lets just touch upon why I didn’t do it. I’ve never really had a desire to do a bungy jump. It’s the actually having to throw yourself off a platform with the ground very close thing that’s the issue. Having been up on the platform with all the people jumping I do now feel as though if I ever got the desire to I probably could do it. The guys at the top were so good at getting one guy to jump who was nervous and everyone absolutely loved their experience. Who knows. Maybe I’ll have a go in the future if I ever get the urge. Simon is now addicted and will probably be bungy jumping all over the place so lots more for me to worry about haha.
He was buzzing for the whole day and still had his Hydro Attack experience to go. Hydro Attack is really hard to explain, but it’s effectively a robotic submersible shark that you sit in that dives under and jumps out of the water. I couldn’t get good photos of Simon doing much as they go quite far out into the lake, but he had a great time and definitely would do it again.
Our fridge battery was pretty flat so it was back to the car to charge it up. We decided to drive along the Northern tip of Lake Wakatipu to Glenorchy. It was our favourite charge our battery drive to date and gave us some amazing fews of the Southern Alps and other snow capped mountains. There isn’t much in Glenorchy itself, but we had a walk along the pier and had a look at the submerged trees (a bit like Wanaka).
On the way back we realised that it was our last night in Queenstown and we had to have another Fergburger. We both ordered exactly the same and enjoyed it just as much. They really are AMAZING.
Queenstown was like a little holiday within a holiday for us. We didn’t worry so much about money here as we already knew we would spend a lot during our visit. We wished we could have spent more time here, but knew that our bank would not have allowed it. There are so many activities, walks, bike rides and places to visit that we didn’t even touch upon and we seriously discussed the prospect of spending more time here in the future. It’s so understandable why people choose to base themselves here during a working visa to New Zealand. There is a massive appeal to being able to save money and do all of these amazing activities on your days off! Queenstown is a skiing and snowboarding centre in the Winter months and we would love to see what its like during that period too. Who knows when that will be. It could be next year or in 30 years time but, I can definitely say that we’re not closing the book on Queenstown yet.
We saw this halo around the Sun created by ice particles in the atmosphere. It was a cold night!!
Simon and Becky's travels 