The town of our Queen - Part three

Our third day in Queenstown, we decided to drive about an hour northeast to Lake Wanaka and do a few hikes up there since the weather was absolutely gorgeous. Wanaka was the most perfect small town...not too big, not too small, just right. Don had found this place in Wanaka called Puzzling World in our guidebook, so we went there, which was pretty cool. The whole place is all about illusions that pretty much mess with your head; we loved it. It made sense to be somewhere like that since it was Halloween :)

It's hard to tell from this picture, but each of the faces is concave and as you would turn your head and/or move around the room, it looked like the faces were following you 

Later that afternoon, we did a few hikes that had a really beautiful lookouts onto Lake Wanaka.

The town of our Queen - Part two

Day two in Queenstown. Don was pretty exhausted from mountain biking the day before so we decided to have a more relaxed day which consisted of drinking coffee, wandering around the botanical gardens, going to the underwater observatory, watching the Targa tarmac rally race finish in Queenstown, eating the most delicious carrot cake I've ever had, and generally lazing about while still having a wonderful day.

We wished that we'd brought along a camera to capture some of the amazing cars that rolled through the streets of Queenstown during the Targa race finish but we had left both my iPhone and Don's camera back at the hostel.

I'm a big fan of the delicious chai lattes they have here...and all hot drinks come with a free cookie?!

From the underwater observatory, we could see ducks diving down for food and then shooting back up to the surface

Going up...

One going up, one going down

Thursday night was 'Recession Thursday' at Monty's Bar in Queenstown, which is one of Monteith's Brewery brew bars. Anyways, beers were $3.50 and they had burgers for $3 so we had a few drinks and enjoyed a nice night out. Beer in New Zealand is normally pretty expensive, both out at a bar or restaurant and at the bottle store, so this was wicked cheap for them.

Queenstown - our favorite small big town - Part One

After much deliberation about whether to drive through the Catlins on our way to the western side of the South Island, we decided we were running out of time and needed to speed things up a bit...traveling at a leisurely pace is great until you've got two weeks left and half a country left to still see! So we drove straight from Dunedin to Queenstown and decided to stay there for a few days before we headed down to Milford Sound and Fiordland because the forecast was five straight days of rain...

Our plan for Queenstown was for Don to do some mountain biking and just to see the area, including Lake Wanaka, which is about an hour away from Queenstown. Our first day, I dropped Don off at Rabbit Ridge Mountain Bike Resort; I should mention that after dropping Don off, I stopped at the A.J. Hacket Bungy Jump site outside Queenstown and watched several people bungy jump off the bridge. It was exhilarating just watching other people do it...I think I had butterflies in my stomach for them! 

After exploring Queenstown a bit on my own, I did a little shopping before hunkering down in a lovely cafe with the first ever iced coffee I'd had in weeks. I think I mentioned before that usually iced coffee in NZ means that it has both cream and ice cream in it. This one was just espresso over ice with some soy milk and sugar in it. I also went to the grocery store to find some lunch before driving down the Esplanade, finding parking, and sitting on the shore of Lake Wakatipu. The view I had while eating my lunch was one of the best views I've experienced during the whole trip. 

Yum

The following are photos that Don took on his five hour mountain biking excursion while I was being a lazy bum :D