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Land of Lakes
En-route to Queenstown we stopped for the night at Wanaka, on the shores of Lake Wanaka. It’s known as the next Queenstown and has superb lake views with the mountains of the Southern Alps reflected in the clear water. We camped at a lakeside ground and had a brief look round the town which was very pretty. We then drove over yet another pass which gave great views of lakes, mountains and Queenstown. Set beside a gleaming lake with snow-capped mountains, Queenstown seemed a bit too good to be true. The main street was full of adventure tour shops, outdoor shops as well as the obligatory souvenir shops. We sat by Lake Wakatipu admiring the view for a while then sat in a park watching the incredibly steep sky gondola (cable car to us) and paragliders launching themselves from the top and landing right by us.
As Queenstown is the adventure capital of the world (perhaps) we decided to go to Bungy Bridge over the Kawarau River and do a bungy jump. Only joking, it was really expensive, but we were tempted. Instead, we watched people jumping into the 43m gorge sometimes dipping into the bright blue water below. Having never seen a bungy jump apart from on the TV I was nearly as scared as the people actually jumping, my heart was in my mouth each time someone jumped!
After watching about 10 jumps we drove on to Te Anau, gateway to the Milford Sound, where another gorgeous lake awaited us – Lake Te Anau. We found a campsite with great views of the lake and mountains – if you had a caravan that is. As usual the tent sights were situated at the back of the sight with only Christmas trees to look at. We watched Old School (hilarious) and for once had a very warm night in the tent.
Cavemen
After deciding that the Milford Sound boat cruises were way out of our budgets and talking to people who had gone but not done a boat trip and said it wasn’t worth it as you couldn’t really see much, we passed on the 240km round trip and instead headed south towards the coast. On stopping at Lake Manapouri, Craig decided that he had to go for a swim in the impossibly cold water. He said that it wasn’t too bad but I don’t believe him. We also visited Clifden, a small town with an historic Suspension Bridge which was built in 1899 and is said to be the longest in New Zealand. While at Clifden we also visited Clifden Caves, a 300m passage open to anyone to freely wonder in and out of. This sounded fairly dangerous to us, clambering through pitch black empty caves with no hard hat and only small torches, but our guide book said “the passages are never tight” so of course we had to do it. Either the person who wrote our guide book was extremely thin or they completely lied about the caves. From the start they were very low, thin and dangerous. Even with torches we continuously hit our heads on the low rock and literally had to lie on our fronts and squeeze through slippery passages. It was worth it however as we saw amazing rock formations, stalactites and hundreds of glowworms. We got about half way then turned back as the next passage involved wading through an underground lake and our torches weren’t the best.
Further south we stopped off at Gemstone Beach where we collected lots of gemstones. There was a sign saying sapphires had been found there but we had no luck that day! We also stopped at a beach and waded through thigh-high water to reach a tiny island in the sea called Monkey Island. We saw some kind of sea birds and a lot of sea. On the way back the tide had come in even more and Craig decided to clamber over some rocks instead of getting wet but got stuck surrounded by really deep water. He made it back eventually and we drove on to Riverton on the south coast and found a campsite overlooking the sea.
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