February 18 - Queenstown

A very short entry today.  We strolled around Queenstown in the morning.  Queenstown was founded in the mid 1800's for farming, but went crazy when somebody found some gold in them thar hills.  There are about 5,000 people today. Downtown is busy and touristy.  Our bicycling handbook describes it thus: "The undisputed tourist mecca of NZ, this town has a mind boggling array of activities to blow your budget on and locals expert at helping."  A good description.

In the afternoon I decided to have a look up the mountain where they have a gondola ride up, restaurant, parasailing takoff area, zipline track, "luge track" and mountain bike trails back down.  Being silly, I decided to bike up the service road instead of paying for a gondola ride.  almost 500 vertical meters of 15% slope - worse than the Coramandel (but I wasn't loaded).

The photos are views from the top. Unfortunately, no parasailing when I was up there but the "luge" track was busy.  It is a concrete track, 8 feet wide with little "go cart" like carts people ride in. I'm sorry I didn't take a photo and, no, I won't go back up to get one for you!

After I returned we went for a "Fergburger" (popular burger joint) and are preparing for the ride tomorrow - about 90 km to a little town called Tarras (one cafe and one backpacker listed).  Probably no Internet there.