Queenstown QED

In spite of talking about jet boats and wannabe sky divers, I don’t think I’ve fully communicated the rich playboy paradise that Queenstown is. On the lake at any time of day, you can see paragliders, jet skis etc, alongside the slower cruise boats and yachts. We also saw these crazy “Hydro attack” shark semi submersible vessels on the lake all the time. I did capture some video myself, but to really grasp what they are and with it, what Queenstown is essentially about, the publicity video is better (you might have to copy and paste the link): https://youtu.be/tfhkpJbeOlk

Even just watching that now is making me feel wobbly. Yet another thing I won’t be doing any time soon!

Ah! And there’s one more observation I’d like to make about Queenstown. It struck me, from the moment I first saw all those beautiful snow capped mountains behind Lake Wakatipu, that if you were born in Queenstown, surely you’d be disappointed by the rest of the world. How can anywhere else compete with such beauty? And yet, apparently, people who are born here often can’t wait to escape it. Well, I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere for all of us.

Our last morning in Queenstown was somewhat marred by the fact that some (not very) bright young thing had parked right across the driveway to the garage. After spending about an hour on the phone and knocking on the door of various people who might have been able to help but couldn’t really, the rest of us went off for a lovely breakfast while Uncle Ken sat lying in wait like a hungry lion for either the offending oik (technical term) or the council traffic wardens to put in an appearance.

While I had possibly the most delux granola ever, Ken had words with the oik, who it turned out had been staying overnight for a party and hadn’t noticed the driveway when he parked. We had just returned from breakfast and got the truck out of the garage and were about to drive off when the traffic wardens turned up, about an hour and a half after we’d called them, looking puzzled about where the offending car was. Ah well.

Here was my deluxe granola breakfast:

I liked the signs on the restrooms in the café:

“Servants” was the door to the broom cupboard.

I had another cuppa as Ken finally got his breakfast and everyone else did bits of shopping that needed doing, and Stu picked up the rental car, ready for our next leg of the journey…