Day 10 Goodbye Christchurch - Hello Queenstown!

We left Christchurch this morning and flew about an hour south to Queenstown. On the way down we got some amazing views of the Southern Alps and of Mt Cook, New Zealand's highest peak at 12,218 feet. William Rees was the first European settler in Queenstown (we are staying at the Rees hotel). The story goes, as told by our taxi driver, that once Rees first saw the view, he said it was "fit for a queen" hence the name. One strange thing we have noticed is that our last three taxi drivers all seem to be the same person. They are tall chunky bald men about our age with thick local accents and are full of stories and jokes. What is going on?

The Rees Hotel is situated just outside of town but is right on lake Wakatipu (which is 50 miles long and over 1000 ft deep!). The views, including right out of our hotel room, (see middle picture with Steve below) are out of this world- like so many other views on this trip! We look across the water at the aptly named "Remarkable Mountain Range".

After checking in, we took a stroll down to Queenstown center, a very cute (but maybe a little too touristy for our taste), nestled right on the water and surrounded by some impressive peaks. There was a neighborhood of shops, a number of adventure outlets and lots of tourists. We hopped on the gondola up to the less interestingly named "Bob's Peak" and had dinner with truly spectacular views over the lake.

We are starting to run out of superlative adjectives for this place but we are relishing every minute!

NZ Fun Fact: We haven't mentioned very much about the food thus far which might be bothersome to some of you foodies our there (aka my niece Liz). So here goes: the food has been good, but I would not say remarkable. Although we have had some very good meals (i.e. lamb loin, duck salad). There is a strong emphasis on small plates or tapas which allows us to try different things (we had an excellent crawfish toast today). As I mentioned in an earlier post there is a strong Asian influence but also everything here is very British based. So today we saw Yorkshire puddings and fish and chip shops seem to exist in every town. Meat pies are also a big thing here. Simple things like coffee, pastries and dairy are all excellent.