Last Night Down Under

My day today started in Queenstown and ended in Sydney. It was another gorgeous day in New Zealand with interesting low-hanging clouds. After packing (my flight didn't leave until mid-afternoon) I walked around and found that there was both a farmers market and an art market. This was a good opportunity to make a few more purchases!

I had a great lunch at a Thai restaurant (naturally, recommended by LP) and then I headed to the airport. Got to Sydney without anything exciting happening (watched Gran Torino on the plane), got to my hotel, and decided to have dinner in an area called Darling Harbour.

And WOW, was this a HAPPENING part of town! Now granted, it's a Saturday night, but the area was hopping! I had a good dinner at the Blackbird Cafe, sat on the deck and alternated between watching people go by and reading. I decided to walk around a little afterwards, and there was a fireworks show! I'm not even sure what the occasion was, but there was some holiday music being broadcast over loud speakers.

I must say, it seemed to be the perfect finale for my wonderful trip!

Arrowtown

For my last full day in Queenstown (and New Zealand, for that matter!) I took a tour to Arrowtown, and old gold mining town. We drove there in an old London-style red double decker bus, making a few stops along the way at Lake Hayes, the K-bridge bungy site, and the Gibbston Valley Winery (which is also a cheesery – I didn’t even know that “cheesery” was a real word…)

As expected, the scenery along the way was gorgeous, plus it was a really beautiful day, at least in the morning.

Arrowtown is pretty small with just one main street, but there’s a really neat museum there all about the gold rush. Supposedly, it’s “the best museum in New Zealand” and they make a big deal out of the fact that Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip have been there. I must admit that it IS a pretty impressive museum, and I wish I’d had more time there, but we had to get back on the bus and head back to Queenstown.

When we got back, it was still a nice day (although getting a little windy) so I had a picnic lunch in a park next to the lake with walnut bread and cheese from the cheesery.

And soon after lunch it started to rain! So I spend most of the rest of the day reading and watching movies in my hotel room. At least the weather was nice for most of my stay!
So tomorrow afternoon I fly back to Sydney for one night, and then I head home for the longest day ever, which also happens to be Mom’s birthday. It’s been a great trip (and I’m not looking forward to the cold!) but I’m ready to go home and get back to “normal life.”

TSS Earnslaw Steamship

Yesterday I noticed that Queenstown has a vintage steamship. Actually, I smelled it first – that smell of burning coal that I associate with some cities in Europe. So this evening I decided to go for a cruise.

We left Queenstown at 6 PM and set off across Lake Wakatipu for Walter Peak. The scenery was beautiful and many of the mountains had snow at the top. The steam engine was also really cool. They had the engine room open so that you could see how everything worked. There were four ovens burning coal and a guy who was shoveling in more coal every few minutes.

The whole voyage to Walter Peak and back was about 90 minutes. It certainly wasn’t as thrilling as bungy jumping or hang gliding, but I thought it was really cool. I think my Dad would have gotten a kick out of it too!

Day in Queenstown

Today I decided to explore Queenstown, which started with sleeping in! Because New Zealand is so far south (and I’m even on the south island), it’s still light out at 10 PM and the sun comes up at 5-something. This morning, since I didn’t have a specific schedule, I put my pillow over my head and slept until almost 9 AM.

I decided to head up to the Skyline Gondola, and on the way there I passed the Kiwi Birdlife Park. It was about 9:52 and the next posted kiwi feeding time was 10 AM, so I decided to check it out. The kiwi house had two birds, a male and a female, and it was kept dark (with an infrared light) to simulate nighttime. The kiwi were really cute! It was hard to see them clearly, of course, but they were like little puppy-sized balls of fluff with really long straw-like beaks that they kept poking into the ground after bugs. They walked around on two legs like drunken old men. It was pretty neat to watch them for a while.

Then I continued up to the gondola station and rode up the hill. The view was gorgeous! When I got to the top, I walked the Loop Trail, which wound through the pine woods on the peak. The forest smelled so good! And I didn’t meet another single person. Then I rode the luge a couple times – it’s two tracks (one “scenic” and one “advanced” with 3-wheeled carts). That was fun. Then I looked longingly at the bungy jump site off the side of the mountain, but decided that I need to stop spending money like there’s no tomorrow…

By this time I was getting hungry, so I went back down into town and had lunch at a place called Halo, recommended (of course) by my LP guide book. I had corn and feta fritters with mango salsa and a strawberry milkshake. I started reading “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” and ended up extolling the virtues of the Kindle yet again to a couple German tourists. Pretty soon I need get on the Amazon.com payroll.

In the afternoon I stopped by the Underwater Observatory where one could see huge rainbow and brown trout, occasional long-finned eels (more than 2 feet long!) and diving ducks (scaup or black teal ducks) diving. The ducks were very cool! It was so neat to see their little webbed feet kicking away as they dove. They looked silver underwater because of the air trapped in their feathers, and when they went back to the top it looked like they were wearing little silver helmets! The observatory was free, so I’m thinking that I might have to go back again tomorrow morning. I only saw two eels (or the same eel twice) and it was very brief. They put out food for the eels in the morning, so I’m thinking that I might get a better view if I go earlier. Of course, that does require getting out of bed…

Hang gliding over Otago

Hang gliding is another one of those “always wanted to do” things for me. My Lonely Planet guide had a really good write-up about SkyTrek tandem hang gliding that insisted that it really does feel like you’re flying, so I decided to try it!

I really wanted to do my hang gliding on Thursday or Friday, but I was a little worried about the weather report for my time in Queenstown. So I decided to book the hang gliding for Wednesday afternoon (after bungy jumping Wednesday morning) just in case the weather wasn’t good, so that I would have 2 more days to reschedule. It got windy in the afternoon but we had a weather check call at 2:30 and SkyTrek said we were good to go.

At 2:50 I was picked up from my hotel by Ian, one of the pilots. We then picked up his colleagues Dave (another pilot) and Augustin (the “ground crew”) and Eve (from Finland), another client. We then headed west out of Queenstown – the opposite direction from the bungy site, which was to the east – and drove for about 25 minutes to the launch site. It was (logically) up the slope of the mountains and considerably cooler.

There Dave and Ian assembled the hang gliders (which we had been carrying on the roof of the van) and Augustin helped Eve and me get dressed up in our very attractive flight suits. Once everything was ready to go, Ian gave me a quick tutorial on how we would take off. In order to do this, we would have to run down the steep slope in tandem until there was enough lift for the glider to take off. We had to do this while attached to the hang glider with a harness, and also while I was hanging on to him.

Luckily, with my extensive marching band experience, the “step (left), step (right), run run run run” didn’t seem too difficult! As it turned out, there was enough wind that we only needed to take 2 or 3 steps before we were in the air!

Wow, was it amazing! For about 15 minutes we flew above the trees with gorgeous views of the valley. At one point, we flew over a pine forest and the pine scent was wafting up to us – so neat! Another time we were over a field and I could see birds flying far below us. A little bit before we landed, Ian asked me if I liked roller coasters, and when I said yes, he steered the glider into a roller-coaster-like rise and fall, which was pretty cool a couple hundred feet in the air!

Too quickly it was over, and we touched down to a rolling stop on a landing field for hang gliding and paragliding. Maybe I need to add “learn to hang glide” to my list of things to do!

Bungy Photos!

Jumping off the Kawarau Bridge!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Woohoo! Yes, I did it! Today I bungy jumped off of the “K-Bridge,” which is the home of the first-ever commercial bungy jumping site, established in 1988. What a rush! The height is 43 meters (142 feet) above the beautiful blue waters of the Kawarau River.

I booked the appointment yesterday and last night I didn’t sleep very well. I had some weird dreams about the jump, which involved doing some kind of training in a gym to make sure we jumped the right way. And my Mom was there! (Not to jump, just to watch!)

So anyway, I got up this morning, had a couple granola bars for breakfast, and headed to “The Station” to check in. From there, our group was bussed to the K-Bridge site, about 25 minutes outside of Queenstown. From the command central building, you could see the live action on a TV, and there was a young woman in a pink t-shirt out on the bridge who looked pretty scared!

I stashed my stuff in a locker and then went to the check-in counter to get weighed. Turns out that they have two different bungy cords – a shorter one for people who are heavier and a longer one for people who are lighter. (I was on the longer one.) They write your weight on your hand so that the guys on the bridge attaching the cord know which one to use.

Then, I went up to the bridge. There I was outfitted with a safety harness. The bungy cord is actually attached to your feet, but then there’s another line attaching the bungy cord to the safety harness. Once I had the harness on, the guys wrapped a small blue blanket around my ankles and attached the bungy cord.

There were a couple other people already there waiting, including the woman in the pink t-shirt. She ended up not being able to jump and I went in her place!

The guys asked me if I wanted to go in the water or not. It was still pretty chilly, so I said that I’d like to touch the water, but not get dunked, and they said they’d do their best. They told me to “do a nice swan dive” and when I see the water coming close to me, put my hands together over my head and tuck my chin. Okay, I think I can do this…

Then, with my ankles tied up, I hopped to the edge of the platform about 18 inches wide, looking down 43 meters to the water! (It looks a little higher than a 10-meter diving platform, I decided!) But I didn’t have a whole lot of time to look around and think about what I was doing, because the guys counted “1, 2, 3…” and I jumped!

I must go off on a tangent here and mention that a couple of the people on my bus back to Queenstown told me that I had “great form” in my jump. Must be all that diving experience!

And it was A TOTAL BLAST! Similar to my (one) skydiving experience, beyond the initial couple seconds’ drop, you don’t have that much of a sensation of falling – it’s more like floating. And the “bounce” when the bungy cord stretches and bounces back is very gentle – not jarring at all like you might think it would be. You bounce back in the air at least half of the distance back up on the first bounce, and then you get that falling sensation all over again! Then after a couple more smaller bounces, you’re just hanging upside down by your feet, swinging from a bridge!

At that point, two guys in a yellow raft on the river came over to retrieve me. They held up a white pole for me to grab, and then the guys up on the bridge slowly lowered me down while the raft guys hauled me into the boat. When I was lying on my back in the raft, the guys in the raft could get the bungy cord off my feet and the guys on the bridge hoisted it back up for the next person. I was laughing and my heart was pounding the whole time! My legs were shaky getting out of the raft and walking up the path back to the building and lookout site.

And then I decided that I DEFINITELY want to do this again sometime! (Maybe tomorrow…???)

Oh, and I do have the photos and DVD to prove it! I'll post some of the actual jump photos once I'm able to download them from the AJ Hackett site. Woohoo!