Not many pictures or much to say today.
We finished the drive to Queenstown. Queenstown is a “destination”; a place to which people come from around the world both for its beautiful lake setting, surrounded by majestic mountains, and for skiing in the winter and extreme sports in the summer – apparently Queenstown is where bungee jumping began.
Tomorrow morning we leave for our 5 day, Milford Track hike. This will be in some of the most beautiful and best preserved wilderness in the world. However, it really is wilderness, so no more blog posts until we get back. I will, however, take lots of pictures and collect other observations.
One of the amazing things about New Zealand is how few people there are in it. One can see this in the road system. From Christchurch west to Greymouth and then from there down to Queenstown we have mostly been driving on the highest level national highways. They have all been two lanes – not two lanes in each direction, but two lanes period. Many of the bridges since Arthur’s pass have been only a single lane, like the Gates of Haast Bridge in the photo below. At each end of such a bridge, is a sign instructing drivers who is to “give way” – Nina and I are going crazy because we have not been able to figure out the system for determining this. This system works because rarely do you have wait, there has been so little traffic.
Of the traffic there is, most of the vehicles are identifiable as rental cars and at least half of those are camper vans.
The Haast River, where we crossed it, is, as you can see in the picture on the right, a white water rafters, dream. Rivers like this have largely been the exception in our experience here. Most of the rivers we have seen are like the one shown below – wide, with huge gravel beds suggesting that a lot more water comes down them at other times.
On the way to Queenstown is another tourist resort called Wanaka. The city is on the southern end of a lake with the same name. The photo below, which reminds me of ones that I took in our walk across England, is of the northern end of this large lake, perhaps 20 miles from the town.
Finally, as we drove from Wanaka to Queenstown we drove on Crown Range Rd. For part of the way, this road sits at the bottom of the V with steep grassy hills on each side. This shot gives some sense of these hillsides, which were gorgeous and completely different in their vegetation from anything we had seen.
Goodbye for 5 days (or more since it may take a while to compose the first posting after we get back)