Queenstown
Queenstown is a very short hop away from Arrowtown, so we took our time getting up and going. We just went straight to the Queenstown Gardens, where we spent the rest of the day before heading to our fourth night in a row at a holiday park. https://www.camp.co.nz, where we watched paragliding tourists come off the mountain above us.
The plan I had come up with for the day was to hike up the Rees River and float back down. It was challenging for us to find a suitable place to float, but this was a fairly popular and straightforward trip. We left sealed roads for the first time and headed into the unknown. It was narrow, not too rough, and had a couple of shallow streams that needed to be crossed. Nothing too spicy. Made me wonder if I had been too conservative with my driving and should have made the trip to Rob Roy Glacier area in Wanaka.
We loaded up the boat in my backpack and hiked up the wide, flat, glacially carved river valley. We spent the day with absolutely stunning views of Mount Aspiring, which we shared with no one. After a week of jostling shoulder to shoulder with every flavor of world traveler, it was good to know that we could get out and find a piece of the island all to ourselves. We hiked about 4 miles before we put in. The trail continued up into the mountains. Pictures I had seen online looked gorgeous, but it would turn our four mile hike into about 12, so we opted to put in. Since we looked at the river on the hike up, we knew what we were in store for. It was shallow. Even without the skeg, we ended up walking a bit on our “float.” Didn’t diminish how beautiful it was floating in the pristine glacier melt.
Back at the car, there was a group who had just finished the Rees-Dart Great Walk. They looked tired, and a group that had started as friends may have been experiencing some tensions at the end of their walk. Our takeaway from talking with the group was that there would be a van coming up the narrow road. It is a pretty long road, and it has very few turnoffs and places to pass. They were getting messages from the driver, and he was going to be late. We packed up quickly, hoping we would get down the road before he came up.
We may have been fast enough to beat the van, but we met up with the classic Land Rover Defender with the livestock sign. Two sisters were bringing down a whole mess of sheep through the narrowest, edgiest part of the road. The exact part of the road we didn’t want to meet the van on. We sat for a spell before the flood of sheep appeared and surrounded us. It was every bit as romantic as the movies make it out to be. Would the sisters be “shepherdesses?” They were much more badass than that name implies. Maybe “sheep guardians” would be better. Anyway, we followed the detailed instructions that the sister gave us: “Stay in the van.” I would also caution my fellow tourists with delicate constitutions to go ahead and roll their windows up when they are surrounded by sheep. They didn’t smell very good, and we spent the rest of the afternoon chasing the swarm of flying bugs that accompanied the sheep out of the van. The rest of the drive worked out well; behind the sheep came the van to do the hiker pickup, so we didn’t even have to make any risky maneuvers around another vehicle on that narrow and steep section of road.
Back at the holiday park, we showered again! Man, we had better be careful, or we were gonna get soft. We then walked into town to get dinner and a beer at The Speight’s Ale House, where we gladly ate the shanks of the lambs that we saw that day.
I don’t really have a lot to say about Queenstown. It’s busy, it has all the city amenities, people generally use it as a hub for different activities around the South Island, and it’s expensive.
Next Stop – Fiordlands!