Queenstown, New Zealand

Queenstown is a favourite destination by so many travellers mainly the thrill seeking youngsters who are out for a bungee jump, a sky dive and a lot of booze. This is the very reason that we decided to skip through Queenstown, that, and the fact that it is extremely expensive to stay here in every way. One famous draw to Queenstown is Fergburger and even we couldn’t resist joining the excessively long queue of hungover adrenaline fuelled backpackers to see for ourselves if these burgers really were the best in the world.

Queenstown is an absolutely beautiful spot, with the beautiful Lake Wakatipu in the middle surrounded by views of the Remarkable’s Mountain ranges and ski fields. You couldn’t but be drawn in by its beauty, what was so sad to see was the about of trash in the shoreline around the lake, the first time in NZ we had ever seen any rubbish at all, but the whole shore was just awash with beer bottles and red bull cans, so sad.

Anyway, back to Fergburger, we joined the queue and could not help but be amazed at just how small NZ was when the young German lads who had been on our Shark Dive trip were in the queue in front of us, spooky. Drooling over the menu we eventually made a decision and about 30 minutes later made it to the till to actually order. This place is open 20 hours a day and I am pretty sure that no matter what time you decided to venture in you will have a good hour to wait before getting some food. So we ordered and we waited and we waited and eventually it was our time. Time to get our jaws around the monster burgers who’s reputation proceeded them so much that this place was as high on our to-do list as seeing the whales in Kaikoura. I am very happy to report that Fergburger did not disappoint and after a good 50 minutes wait we devoured the delicious-ness in just 14 minutes and left with a full belly and a happy burger glow.

Our next stop and our campsite for the night was Arrowtown, an old gold mining town set along the Arrow River. Gold Panning is something that I have always wanted to try and finally here was my chance. We had to go the random little café that gave us a quick lesson in how to gold pan and then we were sent on our way down to the Arrow River to test our skills in one of the few public panning grounds in NZ. To say that I loved gold panning would probably be the understatement of the year, I was after the first pan addicted and despite being completely useless I was hooked and had the most serious case of Gold Fever that the Arrow River has seen in 60 years. Tim was less impressed with panning and decided to make small talk with the other random people trying their hand at it. This was fine by me as the more Tim chatted the more time I had to find my fortune. Sadly it was not to be and despite actually getting a few flakes of real gold out of the river, there were no nuggets for me. I think that I must have had at least 20 ‘one last pans’ before Tim finally dragged me out of the river. Little did I realise that Gold Panners seemingly have thighs of steels as I could barely walk for the next two days after my epic gold panning session.

After a brief overnight stop in Arrowtown and sweet dreams of finding huge nuggets we were back on the road to head over to the West Coast. A drive we had been in fear of for weeks, as we hated to drag poor Blondini up and over mountains if we could avoid it, not that we needed to worry as she was a tough old bird. But with last years disasters in La Toya in Australia we just hated to push our girl. As it was the drive was less steep and windy than pretty much any roads we had driven, we did have two other problems to battle. Firstly at the height of Summer it would seem that China was empty as their entire population had booked themselves a self drive camping holiday in NZ. The problem with this is that as I may have mentioned NZ roads are not the best, the roads are steep, windy and narrow and the huge camper vans that the Chinese like to hire barely fit at the best of times, but when they are driving on the wrong side of the road in not the best conditions they tend to hug the middle line, actually no, I am being too polite, they just drive on the right because that is what they know. Sadly during our time in the South island there were driving fatalities day after day, not always the Chinese, the Europeans were equally guilty, but it started to become a massive problem and the Kiwis took matters into their own hands and started to pull over bad drivers, drivers crossing the middle line and drivers pootling along at 40km in a 100km zone and taking their keys from them. It was like a cowboy town and we even started to take down licence plates of bad drivers to report as it was pretty terrifying taking to the roads. I have to also add the Kiwis (you all agreed with me so I know I am not going to offend anyone) are not the best drivers themselves, they have a couple of habits which just drove us wild, firstly tailgating, even when we were going at 100km they tailgated us because they hated to be behind an old camper; secondly overtaking. Overtaking lanes are few and far between in NZ so when one comes up everyone is excited that they can get past the daudling driver that has been driving them mad for the last 50km. No, what these daudling drivers do in an overtaking lane is to accelerate to 100km so no one can get past them before the lane ends at which point they reduce back down to their usual annoying speed of 50kmph! Infuriating is not the word. Anyway, on top of the terrible drivers, there is the weather to contend with be it gale force winds or torrential rain there is always something trying to stop us. On this journey it was the winds lashing up from Lake Wanaka which were wild and trying to impede our progress. We stopped and had a coffee and a cake in Wanaka to see if the weather might let off, but it was not giving us a break. With poor Blondini’s high roof we were quite likely to end up in Lake Wanaka so we called it quits and booked into a campsite for the night.

The following day we braced for the Haast Pass, our biggest threat so far, and we pretty much blinked and missed the crossing as it was such a small incline we were up and over before we even realised. The weather was absolutely pants so we scooted through the Gates of Haast and stopped for a walk at the Blue Pools which had been so highly recommended to us. Sadly the torrential rain had washed all the silt down the river so the usually bright blue clear pools full of hovering trout were just murky cloudy puddles. Come on NZ give us a break.

We stopped briefly in Haast, a town that if you blinked you would miss and we opted to crack on to Fox Glacier.

Here is hoping the rain stops and the polar bears are out.

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