Our holiday was almost over, and it was time for us to make our way back to Christchurch for our flight back to Melbourne. We had a day and a half to make a ten hour drive from Te Anau, so we decided to drive 6+ hours during the day, and stay a night at the YHA at Lake Tekapo, then a 3 hour drive to Christchurch the next day.

We set off from Te Anau and reached Queenstown by 11ish, and decided to explore Queesntown for a bit. We took the gondola up the mountain, and it was so much more fun compared to the Genting cable cars. I’m beginning to sound like a broken record, but the views were so wonderful!

When we reached the top, Terence went off to the luge track as he had purchased 5 rounds around the track together with the gondola ticket. It’s a bit hard to describe what a luge is, it’s kind of like a go-kart. From the website, this is what it says:

The scenery’s a blur!
Hurtle down a winding downhill track through the trees.
Race through the bends, or pull in for a breather and enjoy the panorama.
Burn it up on the advanced track or cruise sedately down the scenic track.
Then hop on the chairlift and do it all again.
Skyline Luge – it’s 800 metres of fast-paced freedom.
Once is never enough!

It sounds so much cooler than it looks. I managed to get a picture of Terence on the luge, and it looks like he’s sitting on a teeny land-based boat.

After we came down from the mountain, we stopped at Vudu Cafe for our lunch, and here’s our obligatory meal pictures.

After lunch, we explored a bit more, and I must say that I really like Queenstown. It’s my favourite town that I’ve been to so far in the South Island. It’s a smallish place, but very compact, and lots of activity going on all over.

My impressions of Queenstown were further improved when I discovered two shops. The first was a sweet shop called The Remarkable Sweet Shop. They have great fudge there, I tried so many flavors but amongst my favorites were Creme Brulee and Hokey Pokey. I would love it if this shop was in Malaysia, but then again, I’d probably get diabetes really quickly. They do have online shopping though….

The second shop was one that sold this great tasting gelati, I’ve forgotten the name, but it was so yummy. I can see myself putting on tons of weight if this trip was any longer!

We spent more time that we should have in Queenstown, which meant we had to drive in the dark in order to reach Lake Tekapo. Everything went smoothly though, and we checked into our last night’s stay at Lake Tekapo’s YHA.

I would say that overall, comparing BBH to YHA, I think I do prefer YHA more based on the different places that we’ve stayed at. However, either way, backpacking in New Zealand is at a much higher standard compared to anywhere else I’ve been before. So, my dear Shangri-la friend, do go backpacking in NZ, you’d love it!

We went on a one day Milford Sound tour today with Real Journeys. They picked us up from YHA Te Anau, and then we got onto a custom built bus. According to the tour driver, the bus was built specifically for the Queenstown / Te Anau – Milford Sound journey. The room of the bus was clear, so that we could see all around and above us.

The views whilst going up to Milford Sound was stunning. We could see lots of snow all over, the results of the avalanche that occurred a couple of weeks ago.

We made several stops whilst on the way up at several places of interest. One of them was called Mirror Lakes, and from the picture, you should be able to see why!

When we reached the Real Journeys base, we hopped onto the cruise boat, and we were off! As it was winter, they had a promotion where we got a free lunch pack. We started off eating it inside the boat, but quickly decided to go out onto the deck so that we can see more. It was cold and oh so windy, but really worth it.

The skipper of the boat spotted some bottlenose dolphins and he brought us right next to the dolphins, and it was so cool! It was a whole pod of dolphins swimming around, and they stayed around the boat for quite awhile before swimming off.

There were tons of waterfalls all around us. It had rained the previous day, so according to one of the guides, there were quite a few “temporary” waterfalls which would be gone by the end of the day.

Other than the dolphins, we also managed to catch a glimpse of a few tiny penguins, but they were so small and hard to see! Finally, we saw some seals sunning themselves on the rocks nearby.

It was an experience I wouldn’t have liked to have missed, and I’m so glad the roads were cleared of the avalanche in time for us to make the trip!

Today was a semi-relaxing day, we didn’t have much to do except to drive to Te Anau from Wanaka, which was only about 3+ hours away. First, we made a stop at the information center to find out the road conditions of the Crown Range Road, which led from Wanaka to Queenstown. This was a shorter road than the regular highway, but windy and sometimes snowy. They assured us that the road conditions today were good, so we set off on our way. But not before taking some photos of the Wanaka lake and mountains!

There was an awesome van at the information center, and I had to take some photos of that van. If I ever had a van, I’d probably want it to look like that!

After our visit to the i-Site, I had decided to go to Puzzling World, which was just a few kms away from Wanaka. There was enough at Puzzle World to keep us entertained for a few hours, the maze itself took us almost an hour to complete!

The goal was to find the four corner towers of the maze, the easy challenge was just finding them, whereas the more difficult challenge was finding the towers in a certain order. We decided to start off with the difficult challenge, but soon discovered that it was more difficult than it looked, so we ended up doing the easy challenge instead.

After completing the maze, we went on to visit the Roman style toilets. It’s so well done that when I peeped through, I thought there were real people using them! We finished up with the illusion rooms, then made our way back to Wanaka for lunch by the lakeside. Of course, the idea always sounded better in our head, when we sat down by the lake, the wind was so strong that we quickly found ourselves making our way back to the restaurant to eat in peace.

We arrived quite early at Te Anau, before 6 and checked into the YHA there. We asked the receptionist for a few dinner suggestions (not that there were that many restaurants!), and headed off to La Toscana. On the way there, we passed by a park, and I felt like making a quick stop to relive my childhood.

Then, we continued on our way to La Toscana, and our dinner.

We had a late-ish start this morning, as we were booked on a half day hike on the Franz Josef Glacier. We had originally planned to go on the Fox Glacier hike, but I heard that you had to climb about 700+ steps just to reach the glacier, and the sound of that freaked me out, so I chose to do Franz Josef instead. Anyway, I wasn’t too sure what to wear, but the word glacier had me a bit worried. I piled on a few layers of clothes, and then we walked to the Franz Josef Glacier Guide office.

When we arrived, they gave us a short briefing of the extra clothes that we would need. They provided us with overtrousers to keep your pants from getting wet, hat, gloves, waterproof jacket, boots and crampons. After putting on all the equipment except for the crampons, we took a short bus ride to the starting point.

From the drop-off point, we had to walk through a small forrested area, and then it was about 40 minutes walk through a rocky area to reach the foot of the glacier. Along the way, we passed a few small waterfalls on the sides, which were really pretty. At this point, I was feeling a bit overheated from the many layers I was wearing, so I shed the poofy jacket layer. I guess it really wasn’t necessary to put on so many layers, the exercise would probably keep you warm anyway!

At the foot of the glacier, we were split into two groups. The first, was the one that would go a bit faster, whereas the second would be taking a more leisurely walk, with more opportunities to take photos. I wanted to go in the second group, because I knew that I wasn’t fit at all, but Terence wanted the first group, so that’s where we ended up.

About ten minutes into the hike up, I knew that it was going to be a tough day. The steps going up the glacer were pretty steep, and probably not made for a short person’s legs, especially an unfit person! I was huffing and puffing, and had already dropped back to the end of the group after a few mintues.

At this point, I was really glad that we hadn’t chosen to do a full day glacier trek, it probably would’ve killed me! Thankfully we stopped fairly often. As we were the first hike of the day, some of the steps needed hacking with the pickaxe, which our guide had to do, and this gave me a few minutes to rest each time. After an hour or so, we reached the highest point we would be hiking to, and this gave us a chance for a few photo opportunities.

After the glacier trek, we stopped for a quick lunch at The Landing, where we had a chicken cajun sandwich, and a bacon quiche.

We then set out for Wanaka. Initially, I was a bit worried about going over the Haast pass, as I had read in a few blogs that the cars had required snow chains to drive through the pass, and it was dangerous, and we would only be able to go at 25 kms per hour. In addition to that, someone had mentioned that during winter, the pass closed at 5pm! In this case, our only option would be to stay the night at Haast, but the accommodation reviews were pretty dismal.

We made a stop at the information center, and they reassured us that there was no snow, so the chains would be unnecessary, and the pass was only closed when the roads were dangerous. So, we were good to make our way to Wanaka. It probably took us about 4 hours or so, and by the end of the drive, my driving total stood at 350 kms since the start of our journey.

Our accommodation for the night was another YHA, and this one was quite different from the Franz Josef YHA. We were booked into a twin room at the YHA Wanaka, and we got something like a service apartment. There were two rooms inside this little cottage, one of which was ours. The other room was unoccupied, but it was locked. In the cottage, there were all the facilities, shower / toilet, kitchen, TV area. For the dorm rooms, we saw that the shower / toilet areas were actually outside the main accommodation area, so you’d have to keep coming outside into the cold if you wanted to use the facilities. I was really happy that ours was so much more convenient!

We had dinner at a nearby pub, I think it was called Muzza’s. The owner recommended the lamb, so we ordered that, plus a pork spare ribs appetiser, which I decided would be my main course. When it came out, it was pretty huge, 6 ribs! I would never have been able to finish the main course size, which was double the amount of ribs.

I’m constantly amazed at the amount of food that the locals can consume. We also had a dessert, which was too yummy that we didn’t even manage to take a photo. After dinner, it was back to the YHA for the night.

Today was one of the day’s that I had worried the most about our timing. It involved a drive of almost 500 kms to get to the Franz Josef glacier. If we didn’t make it in time, we would have to forfeit the money we had paid for the half day glacier trekking!

Our first leg took us from Nelson to Punakaiki so that we could visit the Pancake Rocks & Blowholes. As we neared Punakaiki, the roads were quite winding, but the views of the Tasman Sea were spectacular! At every bend, it seemed like there were more stunning views. We reached Punakaiki at about 12.30, and set off around the walking track.

The rocks did look like stacks of pancakes piled onto one another, and were really unusual. They didn’t look that sturdy to me, and the waves pounding against the rocks made me think that the rocks wouldn’t last forever because of the erosion. I guess it’s just like the twelve apostles along the Great Ocean Road in Melbourne, things don’t last forever.

Other than the rocks, there were also blowholes in the same area. It was really fun looking at the holes, waiting for the spray of water to come out of the holes. It wasn’t as big as it could’ve been, because it wasn’t high tide, but it was still better than the ones we saw in Australia.

We drove onto Greymouth for our lunch stop, and from there went on to the Franz Josef Glacier. My driving tally today was a measly 100 kms, and Terence was the champion, doing almost 400 kms! At Franz Josef, we stayed at the YHA there, and the rooms were awesome. They were clean, bright and most importantly, really warm. The showers were nice as well, with wonderful water pressure and lots of hot water. So far, YHAs are impressing me more than the BBH hostels.

For dinner, we went to a pub nearby called The Landing and ordered nachos, fish and chips, and a banoffee pie.

Although we’re living in backpacker hostels, we’re sure not eating like backpackers! Lots of the backpackers cook their own dinners, and we always seem to go out for relatively expensive dinners. I suppose they aren’t really expensive by NZ standards, a main meal normally costs about 20 – 25 NZD, so on average our dinners are usually about 50 NZD. We just keep telling ourselves not to convert to RM, and it doesn’t make us feel so bad.