Going up the Country: Queenstown: Winter Revisited

After a 7-hour drive of spectacular views, we arrived in Queenstown at about 5:30 pm on Friday night. Queenstown is the adventure capital of New Zealand. You can do every high risk/high adventure activity you want here: jet ski, 4-wheeling, mountain biking, rafting, kayaking, rock climbing, paragliding, hang gliding, helicopter tours, skiing in winter, you name it. We passed on the bungee jumping. In fact, we had to pass on most things because Saturday was, as our restaurant server put it, “the worst weather all year” and many outdoor or water activities were cancelled. It was rainy and chilly and they were under flood watches. In fact, previously snowless mountains had snow on them by the end of the day. They should be well into spring by now, but a cold front was coming through, forecast to last our whole visit.

But Saturday turned out to be just fine (and by fine I mean a good day - “fine” is used regularly in NZ weather forecasts and means sunny, which it was not). For one, we had three fantastic meals – probably the best ones of our trip. We strolled about in the rain leisurely, savoring the fact that we didn’t have to get on a train or in a car. At 2 in the afternoon, the rain eased up just a bit and we took a lake cruise. Our captain (whose brother, coincidentally, lives in Oroville!) was very informative, telling us about how Queenstown had just a population of 600 when he was a kid, and now it’s about 34,000. He said 4500 tourists come through per day. The whole town is set up for tourism, with adventure outing places every block.

We spent our afternoon playing mini-golf in the most ornate indoor putt-putt course we have ever seen. Of course, Andy beat me like he always does. We also walked around a nearby cemetery where the earliest grave was dated 1866. It had a map of the sections, divided up by religion. There were two Jewish graves, separate and up on the hill.

We woke up to snow on day two in Queenstown – not just in the mountains but outside our window! Not much point in paying to go up the gondola when almost everything from that point was socked in. After another delicious breakfast at Vudu Café (it was so good, we ate breakfast there all three days) we walked around Queenstown Gardens for a couple hours. Everything was in bloom and there was a lilac (called syringa here) garden of many different varietals. The sun managed to peak out for about 30 minutes and it looked like golfers were on the links across the Frankton Arm of Lake Wakatipu. Mind you, the high temperature of the day was 6 degrees…

We shopped for souvenirs in the afternoon and snuggled up in front of the heater in our room as soon as the sun, presuming it was out there, went down. It’s worth noting that everything we ate in Queenstown was delicious.

We woke up to a sunny day and great views, but after breakfast we left for Te Anau, hoping the weather would hold for our Milford Sound cruise on Tuesday.

Internet options are very limited so I’m just dumping the photos below: