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| View of Queenstown from Bob’s peak |
Back to the English-speaking world! The trip from Amsterdam to Queenstown was quite a long and involved affair. I started with an overnight bus to London, then from London I flew to Kuala Lumpur (an 11-hour flight), then a 9 hour connection to Auckland where I arrived in the evening, crashed on a bench at the airport, and caught my domestic connection in the morning to Queenstown. All in all it was over 50 hours of traveling. I arrived in Queenstown very jet-lagged, tired, and grimy.
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| Deer ranch |
I never really got over my jet-lag in New Zealand, waking up at ~3am every night I was here. But, this didn’t stop me from enjoying the country during the day. My primary complaint was that things here are ridiculously expensive! You would think that for a sparsely populated country of about 4 million (Queenstown’s population is only 10,000!), prices should be fairly cheap, but apparently paying one’s workers fair wages results in $10 beers. Also, given that Queenstown is the self-proclaimed “adventure sports capital of the world” (adventure sports not being the cheapest way to have a good time), it’s very easy to blow a backpackers budget in record time here.
Queenstown is in the South Island of New Zealand. To most it is best known for being the shooting location for many scenes of the LOTR movies. The landscapes here are indeed quite breathtaking. The land here, more than any other country I’ve been too, feels incredibly untainted thanks to a very eco-friendly government and also thanks to a very small population especially relative to the size of the country. I think there is a saying that there are more sheep here than people, and I can now confidently back up that claim. The best way to take in the country is by car or bus, and indeed everywhere you turn, flocks of sheep, cattle, and deer (yes they raise deer here, I didn’t know that was a thing either…) fill in the landscape.
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| NZ Landscapes |
The South Island is also know for its’ skiing. When I was there, Queenstown seemed to be filled to the brim almost exclusively with snowboarders (skiing is not so big here) migrating from Australia, Asia, and Europe there for the season. So much to my surprise when I took a day to ride up at the Remarkables, I found myself on a very modest mountain with three lifts and underwhelming snow. The mountain did have a much more extensive terrain park than I’ve seen in most American mountains, too bad I’m not cool enough to take advantage of that.
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| That dropping sensation in your gut… |
New Zealand is also where commercial bungee jumping was first pioneered. I ended up doing my first bungee jump at the original public jump at Kawarau bridge just outside Queenstown. The jump measures 43 meters off of a defunct bridge over a narrow river. I had thought after running of the bulls that I would never get that kind of adrenaline rush again, but jumping off of a bridge and falling within inches of the river below came pretty close to my time in Pamplona. The worst part was actually the waiting beforehand. Sitting on the bus and watching jumpers go before you, all that anxiety and fear just keep bouncing around and amplifying in your head. Once they got me strapped in and I was sitting near the ledge, I was surprised at how relatively calm I felt. Usually with my fear of heights, I get vertigo pretty badly near sharp ledges (wobbly legs and feeling faint are the usual symptoms), but walking to the edge before my jump, I just felt a lot of adrenaline and felt rather restless. The jump was really only scary for the first half-second or so in the initial moments of free-fall, but boy was that half-second scary! Afterwards we reveled in the afterglow of the remaining adrenaline in our veins as we downed a celebratory beer and emptied our wallets for the extremely overpriced (but very good quality) pictures.
In the remaining time I had in New Zealand I ventured further from Queenstown, with a day trip to Milford Sound and two days at Fox Glacier. Milford Sound is know for its scenery (hailed by Rudyard Kipling as the “eighth wonder of the world”). Since I wasn’t planning to visit Scandanavia anytime soon, I figured I should check out the one Fjord I was close to while I was still close to it. The sound is on the west coast facing the Tasman sea that divides New Zealand from Australia, and the area is known to get a lot of rainfall. It only sprinkled on and off when we were there but the sound was very misty. One might say adding to the mystique, but in reality the mist just obscured much of the view we came for. The scenery was indeed gorgeous, but in such an expected and almost boring way that I didn’t feel all too impressed (or maybe I’ve just hit my scenery limit for this trip). I actually felt that the 4-hour bus ride to and from the sound (in which we passed through gorgeous lakes, narrow mountain passes, and a veritable rainforest) may have been the actual highlight.
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| Milford Sound |
Last but not least was Fox Glacier. The west coast of the south island boasts two major glaciers, Franz Josef (named after an Austrian Emperor by a 19th century Austrian explorer), and Fox. The face of Franz Josef had recently collapsed, making my choice pretty easy. The glaciers here have a very unique feature, they are right next to a rainforest! The geology of the landscape here is just right so that as weather comes in from the Tasman sea, they drop off loads of precipitation in form of rain as they approach the Southern Alps which forms the temperate rainforest on the western foothills. Once the weather gets pushed up into the mountains, they drop off ridiculous amounts of snow. The heavy snowfall accumulates, gets compressed to ice by sheer weight, and slides down right up to the rainforest in the form of glacier. The result for us tourists is that the footpath to the glacier face is amazingly through the rainforest!
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| Fox Glacier |
The glacier walk was 90% mundane and 10% very cool. Walking with crampons was actually a lot of fun; I really enjoyed the feeling of crunching through the ice with steel spikes on my feet. The novelty however wore off after a bit, and we found ourselves walking like drones in single file until our guide led us to the next ice feature. To be fair, the features we saw on the glacier were quite amazing considering they were all naturally formed by water from melted ice.
The last bit of excitement in New Zealand happened at the airport. I found out that I needed a visa to get into Australia when I tried unsuccessfully to check into my flight. Fortunately I was able to just walk across the lobby and buy one from the ticket counter.
