Wednesday February 23 – Saturday February 26 – Queenstown and Adventure Touring

We next went back to Queenstown, where we had landed on that fateful Sunday evening.

Along the way we had a funny thing happen to us. We stopped at a scenic pullout right outside of Queenstown, in the middle of the day. We took some shots, some of which I have posted below. Then we tried to leave the pullout, which was packed gravel. To our amazement, we were stuck, almost like when your car gets stuck in snow up to the top of the wheels. It seems we had sunk into the gravel and couldn’t get out. After unloading our luggage, and amazing thing happened – various tourists parked at the lookout all came over and without us asking began to help us get the car out of its predicament. As you can see from the shot below, it was pretty well stuck. About 6- 8 people came and gave us suggestions on how to get it out of the gravel and then helped us push it out – it was a wonderful example of a random act of kindness, and left us all with a warm feeling. It makes me err on the side of helping out others when I have the chance, because you never know when you will be repaid in kind…

Anyways, we made it to Queenstown safely that night (seems like we always have troubles on the way to Queenstown, doesn’t it?) We also encountered some more sheep along the way. See the pix below….

Queenstown is a very beautiful and touristy town that we stayed in off and on for almost a week, with a 3 day hike on the Routeburn Track mixed in the middle – more on the hike later on…

We had the nicest accommodation of the trip in terms of space and view. It was a beautiful ski chalet set on a mountain side right as you enter town. The views were stunning, as you can see from the pictures below. When we are staying for Shabbat in a place, I try and get a nicer place than usual, but in this case we really lucked out. It was a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom house, with a garage, full kitchen, a laundry room (with a dryer, which we learned is not always the case when a place says it has a laundry), a living room, dining room, and 3 balconies! Really a treat to stay at.

Queenstown is the capital of adventure touring – if you can imagine it, they seem to have it, from bungee jumping in many different ways, to skydiving, white water rafting, parasailing, hang gliding, jet boating, etc…Too many to list here. As most tourists to the town, we picked a few things.

On Wednesday evening when we arrived in Queenstown we went to the top of the mountain in town and went alpine sledding and saw some beautiful scenic views of the city. See the pix below. The next day, on Thursday, we first all did an event that was called Jet boating, where they take you in a boat up a canyon with walls as narrow as 20 ft and water as shallow as 6 inches and you go on a ride which I can only liken to a rollercoaster – the pilots intentionally go within a few inches of the canyon walls, zoom over shallow water that you think won’t be deep enough, and then do 360 degree spins every once and a while. All in all, an amazing thrill ride if ever there was one. We all heartily enjoyed this event – there is a picture of us in the Jet boat below, in fact.

In the afternoon, Lisa and I decided to try something called river surfing, which was an activity similar to one I had seen on the Amazing Race. Basically, you have a flotation board and you are in a wet suit and you go down a river that has rapids - its like white water rafting, except you are the boat – you have to kick to stay in the middle of the river, allow yourself to get spun around and dunked in the rapids which g over your head at times, and occasionally you feel like you might drown out there. At first it was exhilarating, but very exhausting, then nerve-wracking as you start to have the rapids go over your head and realize how little control you have in the middle of a raging river. I am glad I finished it, but I doubt I would ever seek to do this again on such a raging river – it was one of the hardest things I have ever done and put me into fear of drowning for a few minutes – not a pleasant thing to experience, believe you me!

River surfing did have one good effect – any other event seemed a piece of cake compared to this, which is how I managed to psych myself to go hang gliding the next day, on Friday. As some of you are aware, I am a bit afraid of heights, and don’t usually like to get too close to the edge of a roof, for example. Yet here I and Lisa were being driven to the top of the Remarkables (here they are again!) to do something incredible – to fly like a bird, if only for a few moments. I did manage to convince myself that this would be simple compared to the river surfing, which it was, and I wasn’t even very scared! Before you know it, they have you in the air and you then sit for 7 – 8 minutes flying a few thousand feet above the ground, making languid circles across fields and roads. It was quite good fun and something I would do again. Also its very safe, with the new equipment they have now – you go in tandem with a very experienced pilot who does everything, and you just sit back and relax – they let you steer if you want to, which is cool because you use your whole body to ease the glider into a turn – the latest gliders have a built in mechanism in the wing itself that corrects a stall, which occurs if you go to slowly while in the air. It was a great experience. See the pictures below, a mixture of shots of me and lisa flying in the air and from the glider. Very cool!
I also took a slew of sunrise shots on Friday morning, some of which I have posted below…All in all, we had a great time, as we prepared for our 3 day hike along the Routeburn Track.