We started the day by driving the short distance from the campsite into the centre of Arrowtown. I went into the Lakes District museum and looked at their displays of the local natural history, the Maori and European settlement and the gold mining techniques used in the area. Whilst I was in the museum my friends poked around the local shops. After we met up we had a coffee in a local café then drove on into Queenstown.
We had looked at the leaflets that we picked up yesterday but found that apart for the things that we had planned to do tomorrow there wasn’t a lot to do in Queenstown. There was plenty of “extreme-sports” activities but these didn’t really appeal to us! We decided to make a relaxing day of it and just wander around the town.
This time we found a good place to park the campervan. We had a browse around the shops in the town centre and I nipped into an internet café and got the contents of my digital cameras memory burnt onto a CD-R. I was running out of room on the camera and this allowed me to free up plenty of space for the rest of the holiday. After that we had lunch sitting in the sun outside a restaurant.
In the afternoon we headed up to the gondala. This was just like the one in Rotorua, indeed, it was run by the same company. The building at the top of the gondola ride had a balcony giving a great view over the town.
The rectangular bay in the foreground is Queenstown Bay, part of Lake Wakatipu. In the distance is the Remarkables mountain range which was permanently covered by clouds every time we visited Queenstown
There was a luge run here too but it was nowhere near as good as the Rotorua one as the track was much shorter. We didn’t bother having a go although we did sit and have a ice cream. People were doing tandem paragliding from the top of the hill. We gave that a miss, too!
We thought we’d be sneaky and book into a campsite in Queenstown and thus get free parking for the campervan. The one that we tried was nearly full and only had very expensive studios left for me. We decided to head slightly out of town to Arthurs Point holiday park. I’m very glad that we did as it was the second best place that I stayed in. The cabin was slightly smaller than the studio that I had in Alexendra, and more expensive at $75 a night. It did have the same facilities, a en-suite, fully equipped kitchen and a TV.
My cabin at Arthurs Point. The only bad thing about it was the tin roof as a bird made a racket trying to peck through it at dawn