Today was one of those days. Again it was bright and sunny this morning, and ideal day to go up the gondola to get a great view of the town and the lake. The gondola was meant to open at 9AM, but when we left the room at 9:15, not only was the gondola not moving, there were no cars on it. We drove over to it anyway, only to be greeted by one of the staff who explained there was some unscheduled maintenance required, but it should be working again mid-afternoon. Now to plan B.
We headed off to Arrowtown, another old mining gold mining town. This one was a little different to previous ones insomuch that that a number of the old miners cottages had been preserved, and an old Chinese settlement had been discovered and partially restored. The Chinese came over in the late 1800’s to mine for gold but were never fully accepted by the locals and Europeans so they set up their own area. As you can see their accommodations were pretty small.
Chinese Village House
We wandered around the town for a bit until a sign for “obscenely delicious sticky buns” caught our eye. With a description like that we just had to try them. The description was accurate!
Phone Box
No real reason for the picture of the phone box, other than it was different!
We went back to the motel for a late lunch, on the way back we drove by the launch point for yesterdays flight, it is just on the snow line, to the right of centre.
View From the Passenger Seat
After lunch we again checked on the gondola situation; it was still dead. Next check was on the Milford Sound road, it was still closed but scheduled to open tomorrow, so we went ahead and booked a boat tour there for Friday.
Lyn had some laundry to do so we spent a lazy afternoon hanging around the motel. Later on we headed out to the supermarket. All the motels we have stayed at have had cooking facilities with pot and pans etc. and we really haven’t put them to use. We bought the ingredients to make a stir fry and headed back. Queenstown is hard to describe, physically it is very up and down, and for the area it is a large town, probably the largest we have seen since the North Island. As far as we could tell 90% of the stores are related to the “adventure” industry, skydiving, bungee jumping, swings, paragliding, hang gliding, boating etc. There were only 2 supermarkets and on pharmacy that we could see. I guess most of the population is transient.
Supper time. Lyn went to get out the frying pan; no frying pan, in fact no saucepans or other essentials. The final clue was that there was not even a hotplate to cook on! We had just assumed that the facilities were there…. Never assume!
Question time. What is this bird?
Bird