Back, mostly in one piece
Published by butercup on Monday, August 08, 2005 at 1:00 pm
Woohoo!!!! What a fantastic time we had over the last 2 weeks. I just know you all missed us terribly.
I had fun! Here's a pic of me with my teeny tiny skis. Yes, they are 150cm long, yes I know I'm a shorty.
So we skied at two places - the Remarkables and Cardrona, which was awesome. It was beautiful weather, there were hardly any people, and just so much interesting terrain/trails. You can follow my route on the trail map - I had a ball of a time, riding up one lift (MacDougall's), going across the mountain (Shaun's Way) to the next basin, skiing down to the base (Captain's Basin) then across the mountain (Comeback Trail) back again and riding up Whitestar to do it all again! The entire round trip was at least 30 minutes. So it was an excellent run. And my skiing has improved, though I'm still tentative on the blue runs ... as long as they're wide I'm ok!!
We also did a 4WD tour around some of the LOTR sites. Mostly it was "this patch of forest/river/hillside is very similar to one that was digitally enhanced and edited to appear as Lothlorien/Isengard/hillside in one of the LOTR films". It was an excellent way to see the countryside though, and a nice way to spend a morning. Tammy our driver was really knowledgeable about the countryside, the local flora, and history of everything we drove through.
Then we flew back to Sydney and overflew the entire of the southern/western suburbs. It's kind of sobering to come from a country with about 4 million people (plus or minus 100,000 Aussie tourists) back to a city with more than that. But if you don't have the contrast I guess it makes the holiday a bit less special. So - Queenstown was awesome, I thoroughly recommend it to anyone. If you want to know more juicy details just email me - if you wait for me to post it then you may be a long time waiting.