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Queenstown

Queenstown, Lake Wakatipu and the Remarkables in the background.

Queenstown What do you want to do? Want to jump off a little shelf 90 metres above a precipice with a rubber band around your ankles? You can. Leap out of a helicopter on a snowboard? Certainly. Crash through a river canyon on a high-powered, spinning, circling jet boat? Float down rapids on a bodyboard? Be strapped to an ironing board and fly across a canyon on a wire? Climb into a big transparent plastic ball and be pushed down a hill? No problem - you've come to the right place. In addition, you can ski, raft, ride, trek, tramp, jump, paddle, abseil, swim, climb, drive and bike up and down or around or through or across some of the most spectacular scenery anywhere on earth. The one thing you can be sure of is that someone will be available to take money off you for the privilege. Queenstown appears, on first acquaintance, to be exclusively populated by young, healthy, handsome people, many of whom seem to share the handicap of having a snowboard permanently stuck under their arm, and lacking either hipbones or sufficient wit to operate a belt to keep their trousers above their butt cheeks. It is a riding, hanging, hopping, drinking kinda place, full of intolerably trendy bars populated by improbably dressed people. It's kind of invigorating, even if you are a spectator rather than a participant, and besides, the whole place is just so beautiful that it is hard to feel anything but overwhelmed and awed and grateful for any length of time. This photo is taken from halfway up one of the steepest cableways in the world (rising 446 metres over a distance of 731 metres), The Skyline, which takes you up to Bob's Peak. (Note the weird 'blue-screen' effect where the hills meet the lake).

Rafting Despite not having a particularly insistent death-wish, the adrenaline-soaked atmosphere got to us, I guess, and Selina and I could not help but want to take part in some craziness. We chose to raft the Kawarau (with the Extreme Green Rafting company, who supplied the expertise that kept Messrs Mortensen, Bloom, etc from drowning when they did this). Here we are, complete with wetsuits (sexy) and Darth-Vader style helmets.

I am second on the left and Selina is on the right.

Crashing down the river in some style (me on the far right, Selina behind the guy on the left). Rivers are graded for rafting purposes from 1 (= flat) to 6 (= don't go there). The Kawarau is the biggest commercially rafted river in New Zealand, nad the section we rafted included grades 2-5, such as Smith Falls, Do-Little-Do-Nothing and the Chinese Dog Leg. The trip took us through the Pillars of the Kings (looking smaller but no less dramatic in real life) and under the Kawarau bungy bridge - a girl came whooping down towards us just as we approached and was picked up by those river-rats in the inflatable (who actually had to do some work that day). As you can see, the river was not its usual blue self the day we went on it, due to recent rainfall. The high water levels meant that the rapids were unusually wild, and we certainly got good and soaked as we negotiated the last grade 5. But we all stayed in the boat - not at all a certainty, particularly not when you were asked to stand on the edges of the raft, or, like Selina, required to ride through one rapid sitting on the prow! There is a grade 6 just downstream from where we pulled the boats up - it's called the Nevis Bluff, and it has never been rafted. It can be done in a kayak (if you're tired of life and want a change), but when someone sent down a raft loaded with sandbags, it came out completely shredded. Brrr. We spent an hour on the river, before heading back for hot showers and roadkill sausages (mmmm, roadkill) at the boat barn. All in all, we both felt that we could have taken on a few more grade 4 and 5's, and we only wished that the trip had lasted longer.

We stayed a few days in Queenstown, most of which were spent in a slovenly way, sitting in cafes and schlepping around the shops, and catching up with the boys in the evenings. Since we weren't going to ski (or jump, or ride, or fly, or otherwise dice with death), Queenstown, for us, was mainly a place to recharge the batteries before heading out to the definite highlight of our trip - Milford Sound.