• Flying, most of day
• Check into hotel
• Visit Queenstown

Today was mainly flying - left early morning (00:45) to arrive in Sydney at around 6:30am Sydney time - flying into Sydney was eerie with red dust haze over everything - made the sun look really weird… after 3 hour wait - flew to Queenstown. Very optimistic flight crew ticket stated just over 3 hours, initially once on the place told 2:45, then about 10 minutes in the air, told 2 hours. Announcement was made there was only 15 minutes until we land - 45 minutes later we actually landed… not surprisingly the tickets were correct - but every announcement by the air crew was overly optimistic (even after having to cue to get a run way for about 15-20 minutes).

View coming in was spectacular with the mountain tops overthe clouds. The flight path is quite complex with many turns before finally dropping into Queenstown (and literally dropping - to the point where everyone let out a collective owww at one point). The airport is tiny, I doubt any of the really large planes can land on it (our plane only just managed to land on it with a very short distance before the end of the run-way). Other than almost loosing Rachel's passport and purse (before we'd got through customs), everything went well.

Hotel is amazing, with views over the lake, with the mountains behind. Fantastic room and facilities (heated flooring in the bathroom which feels weird at first, but nice). Finding everything with the Tom Tom is GREAT (so far), no hassles needing to read maps and find weird places. Had a bit of hassle accessing money, but fortunately the money exchange place could get us money out - problem was caused by the hire car & hotel both freezing deposits and so the ATM's wouldn't give out cash as too much had been frozen in one day.

Both very tired, so got take away pizza from town so we could get early nigh rest, as we start skiing first thing in the morning (who's idea was that!).