Queenstown, NZ 12/2/12 - 12/6/12

As we stepped off the plane and looked around, New Zealand already looked beautiful, green, and fantastic.  Queenstown sits on Lake Wakatipu in the South Island and is known for all the action packed, adrenaline activities in the area:  sky diving, rafting, biking, bungee, etc.  Although everything sounded amazing, we were conscious of our budget and the short amount of time we had in NZ, thus we limited the things we did.

View of town from our hostel

Our first fun activity involved taking the gondola up to the top of the mountain that overlooks town, and then taking a luge down a course track (we opted to do this 5 times, basically pros by the end).  The views while riding down the track were stunning.

The other big thing we did was go see Milford Sound.  We booked an option to take a bus there (4 hour ride), do a 2.5 hour cruise, and then bus back.  The ride to Milford Sound was our first taste of NZ farmland, aka hundreds of pastures with thousands of sheep.  Sheep everywhere!  

The bus ride gave us a chance to take in various views of the beautiful nature surrounding the area. The ride to the sound was almost as impressive as the sound itself.  Milford Sound is very remote (less than 200 people live in the town) and remains one of New Zealand's most untouched areas, even though it's one of the top NZ tourist destinations.

Now, the sounds are actually not sounds at all because that would mean they were carved by rivers.  They are actually Fjords because they were created from glaciers.  The cruise allowed us to get up close to the fjords and provided us with some good views.  Milford Sound is roughly 10 miles, and is surrounded by sheer rock faces rising almost 4,000 ft on each side.  We were actually lucky that the weather cooperated for us and allowed us to go, because for the next few days the road to Milford Sound was closed due to weather conditions.  In rains in that area almost 200 days a year!

The boat even drove us right underneath a waterfall and set out glasses on the front of the boat which were consequently filled up with fresh waster for everyone to taste. Delicious!

As you can see it was quite a long day that started pretty early for us :-).

The next day and a half were spent researching the logistics of our next few weeks in NZ, and catching up on some blogging.  The last big ticket item was getting set up for our next part of NZ: our road trip through the South and North islands!  Fortunately for us, we were traveling from the south, north up to Auckland and most people do the opposite.  Thus, we were able to get a super deal on a white Nissan station wagon for only $17 USD a day!  Even the rental car agent was surprised we were getting that good of a deal.

We promptly deemed him to be called "Wally the Wagon" and took him on his first mission to the Warehouse (NZ's version of Wal-Mart) to pick up camping gear for our next 2 1/2 weeks.  We think we did pretty good as we got a tent, sleeping bags, pads, and camp chairs for less than $150 USD.  We were now ready to go discover New Zealand!