Q-town & glacier country

Okay, now that we're back at the fabulous Hotel SO in Christchurch with it's free internet I'll try to pick up where we left off.  So, since we got a couple comments on the sleep/wake lighting I will tell you that it is GREAT and I will be seriously considering the natural alarm clocks or whatever they're called at Sharper Image.

We arrived in Queenstown mid morning, rented a car and basically just explored the town for the day.  We walked down the hill from our hotel and just wandered around for a few hours looking at the restaurant menus and browsing the shops.  Queenstown is definitely known as the adrenaline capitol because there are endless fear-inducing activities here like the original bungee jump, skydiving, ziplines, jetboating and many many more!  We were definitely the oddballs since we weren't there for the crazy adventures or skiing/boarding like everyone else.  But we enjoyed Queenstown a lot; it reminded us a lot of Whistler up in BC.  The town is literally surrounded by mountains and sits on the edge of a big lake so everywhere you look it's gorgeous! 

After wandering around and splitting a giant burger we drove about 20 minutes to Arrowtown which was originally a gold-mining town.  We did a short hike outside Arrowtown that gave us great views of the entire valley.  We definitely had to negotiate some mud but it was nice to be outside.  When we got back to town we grabbed some soup and delicous garlic bread for dinner and had another early night.  We debated joining one of the infamous Q-town pub crawls but just couldn't bring ourselves to do it! =) 

July 28th--

Got up early to start the drive north to glacier country.  The drive was gorgeous as we drove through the Otago wine country and it's rolling hills with mountains in the background (reminded us of eastern Oregon a bit).  We stopped after a couple hours at Lake Wanaka to try a cafe we'd read about--Kai Whaka Pai--where we thoroughly enjoyed a couple of delicous desserts and some tea.  The next part of the drive took us between lake Wanaka and lake Hawea (I think those are right but not totally sure!) and then through Mt. Aspiring National Park.  We stopped to do a quick hike to see the "blue pools" which were quite pretty and a couple times for bathroom breaks (Michelle shouldn't have had so much tea!!)  We finally made it up to Fox Glacier town around 3pm, checked into our hotel and immediately got back in the car to drive the additional 27km north to Franz Josef.  We got there just in time to do the glacier view hike before dark and got within 60m of the terminal face of the glacier...and "face" is the right word for this one because it has three slits in it that look like two eyes and a mouth.  After that we drove back to Fox to try a cafe that the guidebook said had won the NZ beef/lamb award a couple years ago.  Unfortunately everyone and their brother showed up at Cafe Neve at the same time and we had to wait forever for our food.  We were really debating an apricot pizza vs the steak special but since they'd won the award and the waiter recommended it we decided to go with the special; it was fine but definitely not award winning by any means and we wish we'd gotten the pizza!

July 29th--

I said we got up early yesterday, but today was REALLY early!  We'd read in the guidebook that it was great to see Lake Matheson at sunrise so we decided to set our alarm for 5:30 (front desk said sunrise was around 6:30/6:45) so we'd be sure to catch it.  We also decided to try running around the lake which we thought was probably 5-7km or so. We looked absolutely ridiculous wearing long underwear and running shorts and our fleeces but it was dark and we were the only ones there so we didn't really care!  It really didn't look like sunrise was coming any time soon and it was cold out so we sat in the car for maybe 15-10 minutes before venturing out to the path.  Armed with the camera bag and a little LED light we'd bought at REI we finally headed out on our adventure.  We walked the first part until we were sure the path was pretty even and were thankful for the little LED and the almost full moon and decided to try running.  It was actually kind of fun and since we had to pay so much attention to our path we didn't really notice the running part. =)

We got to the first viewpoint and you could just start to see light in the eastern sky so we decided to keep running and come back to it later.  We stopped at one or two other viewpoints to take pics but it was still pretty dark so we kept running.  We were about thirty minutes in and running down a slight incline when BAM, my right ankle completely rolls and I crash to the ground in pretty significant pain. =(  After a couple minutes I was able to limp on and turned down Michelle's offer of a piggy back ride.  I encouraged Michelle to keep running since we were having such a good run so she just kept running out and back to me for a while.  The trail eventually led us by this foggy cow pasture which was kind of ethereal with the mountains behind.  My ankle wasn't hurting as much after a while and I insisted on walking back around to the first lookout spot because it was the best for pictures and we got some great shots of the mountains reflecting in the lake that I can't wait to post for you all!

When we got back to the hotel and showered I taped my ankle up and we hopped in the car to drive down to see the Fox Glacier.  We'd planned on a hike but decided driving down the glacier view road would suffice and be better for my sad little ankle.  Then we continued our drive south stopping at a couple of quick viewpoints and a waterfall.  The drive back went faster without all the bathroom stops and we were happy to make it back to Otago wine country before all the wineries had closed!  So we stopped at a few different places and really enjoyed the Wooing Tree, Mt. Difficulty and the Chard Farm wineries.  The guy at the Chard Farm was great because they closed at 5 and we got there at like 4:58 just hoping to try like one thing and he gave us the full tasting and chatted our ears off until like 5:45!  We bought too much wine and aren't totally sure we'll be able to get it all back!  We still need to look into the US and Fiji restrictions and may end up having to pay a bit of tax on them but are hoping for a friendly customs officer. =)


I think that pretty much sums up Queenstown and glacier country and Michelle is writing about our trip to Milford Sound and today.  Not sure when that will go up though because she just wrote the whole post and then the computer she was on froze. =(  Hope this gives all of you some good reading material in the meantime. 

We're heading out now to go watch the All Blacks take on the Wallabies in the tri-nations test match!  Woohoo!