Chris and Susan's Big Adventure

Queenstown - South Island.

Susan went down to a conference in Queenstown last week and Chris joined her for a three day weekend afterwards. Queenstown is a mountain town on the South Island in the Southern Alps. It was nice to see some snow. Queenstown itself has a fairly mild climate and doesn't get much snow, so you have to drive up into the mountains to find the snow - which we did.

The flight from Auckland takes a couple hours. The approach into Queenstown is very interesting. It's one of the few international airports in the world that has a visual approach as the pilot threads through the mountains. This means there needs to be good visibility. When Chris came down they had to abandon the approach due to clouds and they were about to divert to Invercargill, but managed to find a gap in the clouds at the last minute. On our way back to Auckland the clouds were very low in Queenstown and some flights were cancelled. Our flight boarded, taxied to the end of the run way - had a look and decided not to fly. So we got an extra day in Queenstown and AirNZ paid for a nice hotel, dinner and breakfast.

Susan went down to the conference a day early and had an afternoon of skiing. This was her first time skiing in about 6 years, but by the end of the day she was starting to feel like she remembered what she was doing.










Her boss Urie trying to keep up.













View from the hotel where the conference was held. Queenstown is on Lake Wakatipu. You can just see the snow near the top of the mountains.












Chris came down after the conference and we
drove out to the Snow Farm to do some cross country skiing. This is where our camera died, so sorry we don't have any nice photos. It was nice to be out in the snow playing.

There are about 5 hours worth of groomed cross country ski trails. This constitutes the sum total of cross country ski trails in the country. We covered roughly half of them.

Chris took a bad fall trying to make a turn at speed coming down one of the hills. He hurt his ribs and that slowed down the weekend a bit. Instead of any hiking or anything else more physical, we had to keep to more sedate activities.




The Shotover Jet ride was lots of fun. Check out Chris and Susan in the front of the boat. It's a jet boat that cranks up and down the Shotover river at about 80 kph within inches of the canyon walls. The ride is punctuated with frequent 360 degree spins.
































Chris went Bungy jumping at Kawarau Bridge, the original bungy site. He is very proud of his excellent form.

He had spent some considerable time visualizing the jump and running things over in his head. As a result, he felt only a little bit of fear as he jumped. However, once he had jumped and was hurtling towards the water the fear suddenly caught up to him with quite a jolt.
































We also drove down to Invercargill one day. It's about a 3 hour drive and is located at the southern tip of NZ (see dotted line on map). You would think that in the middle of winter it would be, well, winterlike, at the south of NZ. But it was actually quite nice and about 8C I think.