Cruising to Queenstown in style

Pictures

We turned in early last night, because we were up at the ass-crack of dawn today. We needed an early start so we could get to Queenstown on time. The Rental Van Crew (which I was drafted into) was unfortunate in that we had to get up an hour before the rest of the schmucks to go get our vans for the trip. Ah well.

The rentals this time were Toyota Previas or something to that tune. They were slightly smaller than the Hiaces we were used to renting, but had air conditioning and handled much better. These attributes would prove to be handy later on.

Our flightplan today included making a pit stop at Mt. Cook, a four-hour detour which looked like it would be interesting. Nobody was quite sure why were stopping there, or driving an extra four hours to do it, but nobody could think of a reason not to, so we went. Two vans of our group of three made the detour.

The drive up, at first, was rather bland until we reached the first of two phenomenal lakes. You have to see the pictures to truly appreciate what we saw. Blue. Everywhere. And not like the generic blue of the ocean, this was a shimmering almost glowing blue that was surreal. The water framed snow-capped mountains in the background, and made the perfect scene for pictures destined for postcards.

We stopped a few times for photo ops, and then continued onto a po-dunk town for lunch. I eventually settled on a little hole-in-the-wall café which turned out to be quite tasty.

We didn’t arrive into Queenstown until late that night, and we pretty much crashed once we checked into our hostel. The rooms were quite big – 8 people to a room, with little shower/bathroom pods for every two rooms. No air conditioning (grumble), but it was just barely cool enough to make the sleep bearable. It was too bad we had to be up at 8am the next morning, because we saw a lot of bustling activity around and wanted to check out some of the nightlife. Tomorrow is going to be EXTREME!

--P