Lumpy here!
We went to New Zealand on a honeymoon last week. We had fun! We went to the South Island and spent quite a lot of time in Queenstown, the self-dubbed "adventure capital of the world". Here's a hand-held pic of us setting off on our South Island "Wine Tour" on our first day. You can see Lake Wakatipu in the background which is the lake that Queenstown is near. Queenstown is very narrow, consisting mostly of a single street with houses that wraps around the lake edge. You can't build too far away from the lake because it's very steep up to mountains. New Zealand is all very mountainous like this. I used to think Canberra was mountainous - it's not!
+++ (random quote - "You told us that this glass was bulletproof and ... it's not!" - Mythbusters) +++
The wine tour was cool, not least because we got lightly sozzed quite quickly. They took us to a winery that had dug a hole in the mountainside, well more like a cave
/tunnel, to cellar their wine. The cave kept at a steady temperature of 10 or 11 degrees or so no matter what the weather was doing outside. Very clever! I half expected to round a corner and run into a band of attacking goblins ... and there was a dark alley behind a gate that didn't look like it wanted to be opened in a hurry, perhaps there was a hidden chest with a +2 greatsword and some Mithril chainmail armour. More likely some fine wine with a -2 drunken penalty.
New Zealand wine was quite interesting. They mostly did whites because it was too cold to grow the grapes for red. The exception was Pinot Noir which they did heaps of. (In fact, I'm drunk on Pinot Noir as I speak!) I thought their whites were a bit too sweet for my tastes, even the one they described as "dry" was a little too sugary. But Forgi thought they were okay. Maybe I'm just too used to drinking reds?
Hmmm, I've just checked. there's like 200 photos here and at the moment I'm averaging 1 every 6 photos. This could take a while, we're still on dial-up here. Hopefully we will have broadband in Canada. It's funny, we will be poor for a while on one income, but it's okay because we will be spending pretty much all our disposable income on high-speed internet. The world is a strange place.
Okay, so the next day, we went up the Skyline Gondola to the top of one of the mountains looking over Queenstown. That was cool. They said the angle of ascent was something like 35 degrees on average but it felt like about 60 degrees. Vertical angles are deceptive like that. We heard a baying sound on the way back down and discovered that there are sheep on the mountainside. They seemed to be baa-ing about the fact that they were up a very steep hill. I would too.
There were lots of bungy jumpers at the top of the hill, leaping from a bridge thingy that protruded out from the mountainside. Looked like a pretty freaky place to jump because of the height. You could see right over the lake and across to the "Remarkables" which was a mountain range used as Mordor in the Lord of the Rings movies. (They were always keen to tell us about bits that features in the LOTR films, it seems to be a significant part of their tourism package at the moment.)
We piked on the bungy jumping but instead went on this weird assisted jumping machine that was like a hybrid between a jumping castle and a bungy jump. The
y get you into this harness around your waist and legs which is attached to two big rubber cords going up to two high posts. Then, they tension the cords and you can jump a few metres into the air and do cool flips. Here's a pic of me doing some super somersault backflip combo. Impressive - huh! It could have been interesting if there was one of these in the hotel room, it was after all a honeymoon...
We drove south to Milford Sound the next day. They're actually fiords not sounds, the former are great sea-flooded valleys that were originally hollowed out by glaciers, and the latter are great sea-flooded valleys that were hollowed out by river erosion. I think the difference is that the glaciers have that much more force behind them, so the cliffs are steeper and rougher. It's very impressive territory. I'll include some photos of that next, but I'm done for today. We've been moving house and I'm beat. More house-moving tomorrow. We're still in Australia but only for about 2 weeks. And I have to work half of that! Wasn't that dumb of me.
Stay tuned for bad jokes about the sound of milf...
