New Zealand Trip day 12 .... Time to go home

Yesterday was a really great final day at Queenstown.

First up we did a Quad Bike Treck thing!

This was so much fun!

On the flat stuff!!

As soon as we gained some confidence, they sent us up some hills!!

OMG that was so scary!!!

When we did that, Stu booked in for a Paraglide.

Im so devo'd!

I was to heavy by about 6 kilos to do this!

So you know what I have come home to do!

Diet, before heading back again next year!

Stu loved it!

He said he had a minor panic attack when he looked down over the town,

but looked up again and was fine!

We also did another Jet Boat Tour of the rivers...

The morning we flew out, we went for a little drive along the river

and found some lovely little spots!
Everywhere you turned is a postcard picture!

Coming home was another adventure.

The Queenstown airport is this quaint little thing.

Looking out over the Remarkables.

Just a tiny little airport, and customs and security were a breeze!

What a gorgeous backdrop!

I mean who puts their airports on this kind of realestate!

Flying over the snow topped mountains.

 

Then we get into Australia!

Dry

Brown

Dirty

It was so depressing!

I used to think we lived in a great country!

We have been to Bali which i hated!

So sleezy!

and seen a bit of Australia,

but now having been to NZ and its such a clean gorgeous beautiful country!

So proud!

The roads are all lovely!

Even the dirt roads!

Such gorgeous proud little towns

and everything is green and treey.

I really didn't want to come home.

Arriving in the airport in Sydney! OMG!

We arrived and we had to get to the connector straight away!

The bus ran late and had to pick up every tom dick and harry on the way!

Went to register for our flight and they had already closed it!

So she wouldn't take all our bags.

I had packed all the toiletries in a bag to go with all my baggage, but the woman wanted me to take it as on board luggage.

I had all my deodorants and hairspray plus some scissors!

Its was locked with a lock

so it had to go through securty and be opened and go right through it.

So Stu sent me to hold the flight!

They went through my bag and then started on Stus backpack and though a heap of stuff out.

So Stu is running to the gate which closed 10 minutes ago!

and he got there and forgot my bag!!

So he had to go to lost baggage to get the bag he just left there!

We finally got on board and was sat next to a screaming child!

Arrived in Tamworth with Stuarts bags missing!

He turned up a lunch time today!!!

A great end to our fabulous holiday!

New Zealand Trip Day 11 - Post by Stuart

anuary 21st..... Best Monday InYears

21st January 2013 We awoke to a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky and crisp mountain air nipping at our ears. We had a half hour to kill before heading out to the quad bike ride so we grabbed some breaky and walked along the bay.

It’s official, I’m allowed to buy us all quad bikes now, Jodi had a ball. They spent the first half an hour seeing how to split the groups up, so I didn’t see Jodi much while we were out there, she was in the “not so fast group” on a little automatic CanAm while I was on a little Suzuki.

Being a bike rider I kept stuffing up the brake, throttle and gears. A bike is 1 down 5 up, the quad is 5 up with neutral at the bottom. The left lever is the rear brake, not the clutch, there is a thumb throttle not a twist grip.....

After a quick “do’s and don’ts” we were off into the hills, creeks, gullies, cow paddocks and whatever else we could find on this 11,000acre property.

We were back in town on the bay for a drink by 1.30pm.

Mmmmm.... what to do next..... how about paragliding, you bet.

That’s me, I have video footage to put up later. Let me tell you that paragliding is a hoot, after a slight anxiety attack when I looked down and realised we were 2000’ above Queenstown I calmed down and just enjoyed the flight. We were back at the harbour about 4.00pm too early to head back to the motel .... what to do....how about a Jetboat ride across the lake and up the Shotover River, sounds fair to me.

Well, tomorrow we fly back home, Jodi doesn’t want too, I keep telling her I’m going to print a heap of photo’s and make a collage with the caption under it saying “this is why we work”. It’s been a huge 12 days looking back, we’ve ticked a number of things off the list but we’ll be back, guaranteed, this place is awesome.

New Zealand Trip Day 10 - Post by Stuart

back to Queenstown

January 20th There’s only one kind of day to have over here....huge... We left Te Anau about 8am, it was a bit cold, windy and overcast, not much of a day really but the scenery soon puts you in a better mood, Jodi reckons she is suffering scenery fatigue again, too much to look at so she reads a book while we drive along, she’s left it up to me to take photo’s now.

The sunrise and sunsets are both drawn out down here at south of Tasmania, it gets dark about 10pm and it’s not really sunny until about 8.30 – 9.00am, hence you can get some good light pictures without getting up too early. On the way back to Queenstown I snapped these ones of the hills.

I also managed a crop inspection, so guess this is a work trip after all hey.

Even saw a few of the more intelligent local up close again.

Also found my next business already setup and ready to buy... seriously doubt it would pay as good as boring old grain brokerage but I’m thinking the life style might help compensate the lack of income.

This is a great pic of the southern reaches of the lake out the front of Queenstown.

We had an hour or so to kill before the bus left for the jet boats so we cruised around the main streets, Jodi checked out the opposition over a cup of coffee.

We also found this gallery promoting this animation, it’s based around these dog / human things that live in the area, apparently Disney has bought the rights so it might be on a screen soon.

Around illivin fifti we jumped on the bus to take us to Skippers Canyon to go jet boating. The ride through this goat track to the Shotover river was better than the jet boats. This is the view from the top before we head down into the canyon.

Some of the road had 100mtr cliff to the left and 100mtr rise the right and the road was about 12’ wide.

We strapped on the life vests and jumped on the boats and done a 9k run up the river, it was fun but I thought he was sparing the ponies a bit myself, I had the GoPro filming it so I’ll post up some vids later.

Back off the boat we headed to a area to have a good look at the canyon we just boated down before heading back to town.

After a slight run in with the motel about room allocation I got over my case of the shits and settled on what they gave us, it’s better than the last one they gave us a couple of nights ago but still nothing like what I thought the travel agent had booked, I think next time I’ll just book it all myself so I don’t get the disappointments with the rooms I’ve had this trip. The motel dude let it slip and said "these are the rooms we allocate travel agent booking", implying they get the shit rooms !!!. This is the view we have tonight, better than the compost heap and chook shed the other day but still not what I was expecting.

We’ll we are off quad biking through the mountains tomorrow morning and if the wind dies down I might have a crack at tandem paragliding or get a chopper ride to the glaziers, we’ll see.

New Zealand Trip Day 9 - Post by Stuart

Te Anau 19-1-13

Saturday January 19th 2013 We drove about 170ks SW of Queenstown to Te Anau today.

There is some very good grazing country around here, lots of sheep, cattle and dear.

Yet another beautiful town on another beautiful lake. This place is much more laid back than Queenstown, the scenery is not quite as spectacular but pretty impressive all the same.

Te Anau is basically the gate way to Milford Sound, initially I had full intentions of driving to Milford Sound and spending the night at Te Anau on the way back but as it turned out we were both sick of driving and getting stuck behind camper vans and the day was less than ideal. Rain early cleared but only due to the fact a roaring southerly pushed it out. We drove around the town for a while and fell in love with the laid back nature of the place. We ended up in the burbs where all the new houses were getting build. There was an open house so we called in and had a look, it was a nice little holiday house about 20sq on a small 800mtr block worth about $350k,so comparable to Gunnedah, with the currency converted to AUD it would work out around $280k............anyone interested.

I called the local water plane and he said it was too choppy to take off at Te Anau and way to choppy and pouring rain at Milford Sound to land so we just bailed on the idea today and headed back to the room for a lazy afternoon, well when you get the spa suite you may as well use it. After a nice meal we walked along the edge of the lake as long as we could in the cold wind and grabbed a few pics. I’m glad I bought a good jumper this afternoon or I would have froze.

While shopping this afternoon I found these two guns, the first one is set up for night hunting while the damage on the second one was done when the riffle was fired when it had frozen.