Leaving the luggage at the motel, it was time for a last day in Queenstown. The mornings down here have been decidedly crisp, but despite the forecast, that crispness extended to the air – a bright and clear autumn day. A spit of land extends into the lake, and on this spit are the Queenstown Gardens. There is a pond, and some flowers, but it’s mainly trees and tracks, so we took a gentle stroll around there, trying to keep in the sunshine as much as possible. The bellbirds were calling from the trees, and the paragliders were already descending from Queenstown Hill, carrying passengers in tandem. We also nipped down into the mini underwater observatory, where you can see immense trout – the kind that would feed a large family, rather than the kind which might get served up whole with a few flaked almonds. The most interesting things were the eels, however, muddy black, a couple of metres long and as thick as your arm.
The ride up the hill in the cable car is scenic, but made much more exciting if you go up with Deborah. It takes on a whole new dimension when someone in your car is hiding their eyes and yelping at each swing and bump. The views from the top are fantastic, revealing the mountain ranges and the lengths of the lake, while those tandem paragliders whiz overhead repeatedly after taking off just a little further up the hill.
Queenstown is famous for its range of adrenalin-fuelled activities, from river rafting to parascending to helibiking. The cable car is not normally considered one of them, however. There is a rock face bungee jump at the top of the hill, while at the bottom we found a bungee swing. Perhaps a mite mild for true adrenalin junkies, but it suited Louis, Conrad and Rosanna down to the ground, and up into the air, and down… etc. Having least weight, the bounce kept going out of Louis’ bungee (shades of Wallace and Gromit), so the chap who ran it kept having to haul him down by his foot and ping him into the sky again.
Then, disappointingly, it was time to pick up the bags and catch the bus back to the airport. What a lovely airport Queenstown is – a real Tintin airport, full of light aircraft which make the lumbering Boeings look out of place, surrounded by mountains, and passengers climbing up the wheeled steps to board their planes. That’s how airports ought to be!
We flew back across the mountains to Christchurch in the setting sun, then on to Auckland in the dark, the end of our five day South Island holiday.
Back to work today, for the final day of term. Time for goodbyes.
We have a few more days in Auckland before we fly out, then we have a couple of nights in San Francisco en route. However, when and where we’ll be able to get at a computer again is anybody’s guess, particularly with the Queenstown internet experience in mind. Not only the crawlingly-slow internet café, but the wi-fi in the motel, which worked, but took about twenty minutes to load a page. There may be a chance in the US, but otherwise the end of this tale will have to be uploaded from St Albans. I think we’ve been there before, some time ago, in another life.
