Hi everyone,
Hope you're enjoying decent Bank Holiday weather... we've been battling through the rain and snow in New Zealand in the past few days. We arrived in Queenstown on Wednesday night, with the thermometer in our van reading about 2 degrees and snow covering the mountains round the town.
Queenstown is New Zealand's home of adventure sports with white water rafting, parasailing, bungy jumping, parachuting and all sorts of activities on offer. So we decided that now we'd got here, if we were ever going to jump out of a plane it was now or never......
Yes that's right, we decided 'never'! To be fair, Sarah would probably have done it, though preferred to spend the money on cappuccinos, whereas Phil would have had to have been drugged (like they used to do to Mr T on the A-Team) to get him in a plane.
Watch a video of the bungy jump by clicking
">this link (sorry, it's somebody else jumping!)
We did try out luge-ing though....dastardly daredevils that we are. We got a cable car up one of the mountains over-looking the town and got in plastic toboggin-type things on wheels and raced each other down the track. It was really dangerous and adventurous, honest! We had to wear helmets and everything, so it must have been! The fact we were both beaten to the bottom by some 8 year old kids proves nothing...
Though to our shame, we realised that two weeks was by far the longest time we'd gone without eating in a restaurant since we first started dating over 4 years ago....maybe if we'd eaten in a van every night before coming away, then we could have gone travelling for two years instead of one! Though we're not quite sure where we'd have got the van from.....
On Friday we headed north to the town of Wanaka (careful how you pronounce that...). Like Queenstown, it's in yet another incredibly beautiful setting, on the shore of a big lake surrounded by mountains.
It's a bit of a mini-Queenstown, being a quarter the size and specialising in outdoor activities. Though it does have one attraction that Queenstown doesn't....Puzzling World!
We all know how much Sarah loves her puzzles and games don't we? So there was no way she could resist a trip to Puzzling World was there? It's a like a mini-theme park with a big maze, "room of illusions" and loads of other attractions for puzzle freaks. It took us about half an hour to make it round the very confusing maze without once rowing about directions - incredible!
After we were puzzled out, we did an hour long walk up one of the mountains over-looking the town for more photos and pano opportunities. We just about made it down in time before a snow storm blew in!
Saturday was glacier day. We drove north up the coast to check out the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers. Both glaciers start deep inside the Southern Alps, near Mount Cook which we visited from the other side two weeks ago, and they're both very impressive.
The glaciers are about 15 miles apart and both involve an hour's walking to get to the "terminal face" as they call it. They've both retreated a couple of miles since their peak in the 1750s so you walk through all the rocks and boulders that they've left behind, while surrounded by sheer cliff faces that they carved through the rock.
We got within about 50 metres of each glacier's face, so we could really start to appreciate their enormity. Though that's as close as you're allowed to get because bits fall off the faces about 4 or 5 times a day and the huge chunks could crush you. In fact, some people have died in recent years after ice fell on them, so we stayed a safe distance.
In between visiting the glaciers, we also did walks around Lake Wombat and Lake Matheson. Lake Matheson has clear views of Mount Cook and Mount Tasman, which gave incredible reflections in the water (see below and picture at the top of the page).
We finsihed at about 5pm and then drove about 140 miles up the coast to spend the night in Greymouth. Today (Sunday) we're taking a fairly leisurely 4 hour drive up to the very north of the South Island to Nelson and Abel Tasman National Park. The plan is to get the ferry over to the North Island on Friday and make our way up to Auckland over about 10 days. Then we'll spend a few days in Auckland before flying to Chile on 22nd May.
That's all for now folks! Take care.
Love Sarah and Phil x
