Day 5 - Wanaka to Queenstown

Monday 18th June

Waking to the sound of light snow/icefall

Taking a moment to adjust (and
hold down stomach contents) in the
leaning room

Waking to the scene of the lake down below which was hidden in darkness when we arrived

Cloud-strewn mountain ranges in the distance, dimly reflected in the choppy steel grey waters of the lake below. Nothing but trees and empty caravan spots around us (apart from the creepy caravan that was still there). 

Lazy brekkie in with The Simpsons, tea, crumpets and cornflakes. Breakfast of champions! Made up for having to shower and toilet 200m away in the pitch blackness through forest, the night before. (Think scenes from the Blair Witch Project).

Today was about the sights and fun things to do around Wanaka town, introduced to us by the helpful Tourist Radio unit in the campervan.

Puzzling world - Wanaka

  - arriving before anyone else

  - thank god it was not school holidays, this place looked like a kid's paradise. Big kids included!

Hard at play in the puzzle room. 

Ed pushing the tower over onto
hapless unsuspecting tourists

  - coffee and a puzzle in the large common room

  - hall of illusions, holograms and faces that watched you

  - Ed's favourite - the sloping room. 13 degrees above horizontal but made to look like a real room, tricking the brain. Nausea-inducing, didn't feel right for hours!

  - the Ames room, with the two sides making us either looking gigantic or tiny. V funny

-maze , doing it backwards and getting completely lost on the "exit" trip after finding the 4 coloured towers. At least we beat the Korean couple who had started just ahead of us. (in actual fact we saw them cheating and using an emergency exit to escape at the end anyway)

Ed in the Roman bathroom afterwards with a few
fellow Romans doing their business - Puzzling World

Fore!

Tea and sammiches in the Puzzling World carpark courtesy of inbuilt fridge and LPG tank for boiling a kettle. Love the campervan life!

Off to the shooting range - the "Have a Shot" range in Wanaka

  - archery, driving range and rifle range in one

  - very cool, got to feel masculine!

  - we took on the challenge of all activities

  - Ed got to relive his old archery championships days, AG his rifles-shooting-rabbits-on-the-farm-in-Mudgee days

  - Ed told he looked funny sighting the rifle not being able to close left eye. Did not take kindly to the comment. Sour mood until coffee saved the day!

Little did AG know but Ed
had replaced the target with
a photo of him

AG lets loose a flurry of feathers

Back to Wanaka town. Coffee and brownie by the lakeshore. The most stunning backdrop ever - glass smooth lake and towering snow capped peaks surrounding it. Most beautiful scene so far.

Shopping. AG refused alcohol even with an Australian licence. Don't they know this is another state of Australia? Ed got mobile data. Health food shop! AG all over it. Whey protein bag - check.

Haulin ass to Queenstown in the beast. Man at shooting range had advised us not to take a particular road as it was treacherous in a campervan. I paid scant attention, registered there was a bad road. Convinced I was on the good road out of town. 

If that was the good road, hell only knows what the treacherous one was.

Started out innocently enough, running through empty country roads and past abandoned gold mining towns. Striking through stunning brown valleys and gorges, surrounded by misty hills and soaring mountains. Then the ascent began.

Lookout point at 1076m - highest sealed road in south
island. Ready for snowfight after hectic drive up.

Should have noticed by the fact there were so many "snow chain bays". AG terrified of having to use snow chains, never had to before. Plowed on up icy roads steeply winding their way up the mountain to the mountain pass at 1076m. From 300m. 

Remember, this is a nearly 8m vehicle built like a tin box on wheels. It doesn't corner well and we had been frightened by the stories of breakdowns and accidents near the campsite that morning owing to 'black ice'. Naturally that's then all we imagined we saw from that point on.

Finally reached the pass, the highest sealed road in NZ at 1076m. Greeted with the most spectacular vista you could imagine. Sunset staining the distant jagged horizon a deep flamingo pink. Bronzed ravines creasing the faces of the mountain ranges sweeping away in a crescent to each direction. Splatters of frosting and snow. And peeking through a valley in the distance, the twinkling reflected lights of a lakeside city. Just stunning. We stopped and stood up there until a van slightly smaller than ours stopped and unloaded 5 earnest young travellers. We hopped back into our mansion, just we two.

Both of us looking both happy and excited to have survived the drive up the mountains.
Wait ... there's a downhill as well??

The white knuckle drive up the mountain was nothing compared to the descent, much to AG's dismay and Ed's lurching stomach.

View from the pass with the beginning of the winding
road down hill just visible.

Where the road signs up had advised cornering at 65 or 55 kmh, the road signs down suggested 35 and 15 kmh. More hairpins than a drag queens dressing room, but so much steeper. I'm sure we were at about 45 deg of tilt to the sides as we tried cornering around180 degree bends. On black ice. With a queue of traffic building behind us. Ed petrified of black ice providing an earful of driving advice, but demurely deferring taking the wheel. Required all of my concentration and Ed's suppression of screaming to get through it. Total distance - 5 km of torturous turns in a lorry sized vehicle with sedan gears and brakes. Loved. Every. Second.

Queenstown itself just gorgeous - from a distance. In here feels like a built up tourist trap compared to the wilder parts we've been. Street lights, traffic, one way streets. Still, it has a European or USski resort feel to it, with ski jackets and beanies de rigeur. 

Tried the FergBurger here. Amazing burger (we shared). Long wait.

Campsite so full of powered sites - very much more commercial than we're used to.

2 Shots of vodka to wind down after the nerve wracking drive (including not just the death-defying mountain ice-drive, but also driving through narrow city streets trying to find parking, getting to an abandoned campsite firstly, then missing the turn off to the actual campsite and having to reverse in a steep private driveway)

Early night to be up for skiing tomorrow!!!