Queenstown, the Cheap Version

And now on to the final installment of my Easter Break adventures (nearly a month later, I fail at updating my blog!).  So I arrived in Queenstown on a Saturday evening so I didn't get to do much besides grab some dinner and pass out in my hostel from exhaustion.  The real fun started on Sunday.  I figured, since I had four days in Queenstown, I could take my time adventuring so I got up late and wandered up a path marked for Queenstown Hill.  It's just a foothill that looks out over Queenstown and lake Wakatipu, but boy is the view awesome.  It's not a horrible horrible hike, but some of the uphills are kind of hard.  It was another one of those hikes where I started walking up and thought I got to the top...and then kept going up....and up...and up.  It follows a path through a pine forest until it clears to just grasses and scrub brush.  The forest path got tough at times because it was covered in pine needles so sometimes it was really slippery.  There was, however, an actual designated path for once!  There were some cool informational kind of signs that had what the town was founded on, some Maori legends, and different bird species in the area on them.

All in all it was a pretty relaxed day, I hiked around for about 4 hours, stopped in town and picked up The Hunger Games and read it in the afternoon before getting an early night's sleep so I could get up early for my trip to Milford Sound on Monday.  You may read all about that in my previous post, but it was a giant fun packed day.

My next adventure, conituing with the relaxed feel of the week was really just an exploratory trip.  I wanted to check out the Queenstown Gardens in the morning and then just go from there.  The gardens were beautiful.  Since it was mid-autumn so I wasn't expecting too much, but there were tons of flowers blooming and trees changing colors.  I wandered through the gardens for most of the morning, there were many other people in the park, quite a few were taking part in frisbee golf course that was on the periphery of the park.  The gardens has samples of flowers and trees from all over the world. 

I got quite fancy at some points, and played with my settings.  There were a whole bunch of beautiful little spots that I was just sitting at and taking pictures forever.  I'm sure everyone that walked past me thought I was a strange person. 

The coolest part of the gardens were, in my opinion, the flowering rose gardens!  They had giant sections of roses of all varieties and colors that were in full bloom.  It smelled like you walked into a perfume shop, and looked like one of those fantastic Disney-level garden parties.  I felt like there should be a wedding or fancy dress party there!  It would've been a perfect place for me to wander in a poofy dress, with elbow length gloves, and a little tiara.

After I had wandered the length of the gardens I found myself on a path by the lake.  Not knowing exactly where it led to I followed along it for a while.  It was the perfect day for a nice easy walk: the sun was shining, there was the slightest of breezes, and I had bunch of snacks in my pack.  As I meandered along the lakeside path I took a ton of pictures of the Remarkable mountain range. It's the range you can see just across the lake, behind Frankton.  As it turns out, that's the direction the path was heading, and I ended up walking all the way from Queenstown to Frankton along this path.  They aren't that far apart, it was only about a 12km round trip.  It was good to relax, watch the clouds coming over the mountains, stop and admire the water, and listen to some good music.  Actually, most of the time I had on my LOTR audiobook, right at the part where Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn are trying to track down Merry and Pippin.  It was good fun.

A brief digression here, and I'm slightly peeved about this story because it's not actually mine, but my flatmates.  They all belong to this gym called Les Mills, and go do workout classes there and everything.  I didn't join because it didn't make sense for me to buy a year's membership if I was only going to use it for 3 months.  Anyway, I really wish I had joined the gym, or even done a day pass that day, because guess who goes to their gym?  None other than Legolas himself: Mr. Orlando Bloom!  First off my flatmates are the biggest jokesters so I 100% did not believe them when I first heard about it.  Then I saw an article that said he was in town... and one of the other girls we're friends with confirmed that she saw him too.  I was fuming.  This is what I get for not joining the gym.

The best part of the story is that one of my flatmates didn't even notice him walk past them on the stairs, while the other two did a complete double take and then freaked out about it after the got around the corner.  If I was there I might have died from shock and awe, but they didn't even say anything to him!  Apparently it was deemed too weird to say something to him at the gym, which I guess I would understand, accept I'm only here for a short time and would definitely take the opportunity to tell him he's amazing and awesome.  Well that's my fun digression.  On to more exciting adventurous hiking things....

The Remarkables at sunset

 So, on my final day in Queenstown I decided to go for a bit of a more lengthy hike.  I decided to tackle the Fernhill trail via the Tiki Trail.  The Tiki Trail was simply a connection from Queenstown to the actual trail head.  It was, as usual, a very steep and meandering trail.  Of course it wasn't too clearly marked either.  The only clearly marked parts of it where when a couple random set of stairs appeared half way through the trail.  They had all sorts of graffiti scrawled all over them from visitors from around the globe.

Finally I started my hike to the Fernhill Trail from the Trailhead...except it wasn't actually marked.  There were a whole bunch of different trails and half of them were mountain bike trail.  I could only tell those apart from the walking trails because of the little "watch for bikers/hikers" signs on each of them.  Finally I noticed this kind of raised path that paralleled the bike trail.  It looked too narrow for the bikers so I took the chance.  Eventually it diverged from the bike trail, but I kept walking along it rather slowly and deliberately looking out for bikers the whole time just in case.  It was kind of odd, because it was marked with little orange triangle signposts every so often on the the trees, but it never once said "Fernhill Path" until I had hiked the whole trail, so who knows--maybe I did it backwards. 

Anyway, the trail was beautiful.  It just kept going up, but at a slow steady pace.  It went through a variety of beech and pine forests, so the light dappled through the trees quite beautifully.  I was the only one on that trail the whole time.  I never saw anyone else, so it was a nice quiet hike.  I got to take in all the beauty around me.  About half way through the trek it opened up into this high hill not too far down from the top of some of the peaks near by.  It was an excellent place to stop for lunch, so I sat down and ate my sandwich and snacks and admired the views.  It was 360 mountains.  You could look out and see the Remarkables across the water, and the peaks behind me as well.  It helped that it was such a clear calm day, because the sky was a gorgeous light blue.

After lunch, I got a little surprise on the trail.  I hadn't been paying attention really to what was around me when I stopped and looked up only to see this crazy looking skull on the trail!  Talk about a makeshift warning sign.  It was literally just a mountain goat skull on a stick, but it sure scared the heck out of me up there by myself.  I didn't think too much about it at that time, considering I knew there weren't that many wild goats or anything really in New Zealand.  Besides, the trail was starting to become one of those typical obstacle course trails where you have to go over and under logs, streams, and whatever else had fallen in the way.

Danger Will Robinson, Danger!

It was like that silly song you used to sing as a kid about the bear hunt: I'm going on a bear hunt, oh no a tree?!  Can't go around it, can't go over it, we have to go....under it!

 Then there was the tiny little trails that were only a foots-width, next to a pretty steep drop.  It was like the people who made the trails were saying to themselves, "there so many trails, we don't want to groom them all....We'll just make them all ridiculously hard to do so only the serious trampers will bother."

Well it was worth it in the end because after I got around that bend and went a little ways, I got to another really big clearing and heard some weird noises.  It was one of those things where I'd been tramping by myself for so long that I wasn't sure if I'd actually heard it or made it up.  I looked for something that could be making it, and sure enough just like the weird warning post earlier on the trail there were some mountain goats!

It was just one of those things that made me ridiculously excited to see.  They were way up in the hills by a line of trees opposite to me.  I just stood and watched them for probably a good 30 minutes, but none of them seemed bother by me.  It was an excellent way to end my trip: random wildlife sightings.  I finished my hike, and took a walk along the lake to get back to my hostel and then packed my bags that night.

I got up early the next morning to catch a bus to the airport and I flew out at 10:30, back home to Wellington.  Thus (finally!) ends my South Island Adventures!