Today was a designated rest day but we still ended up doing heaps.
We headed off to the home of the jetboat / thrill rides, Shotoverjet. 530horsepower and 3 tonnes of boat makes for a bloody quick ride up and down the shotover river.
360° spins, sharp turns, slides through the corners and getting ridiculously close to the sheer cliffs was incredibly good fun. It’s certainly one of the best things we’ve done even though it was freezing, literally.
Our driver was telling us that they started late today due to the river icing up in parts and earlier it was -25 degrees with the wind chill factored in. By the time we got there @ 1pm, it was apparently a lot warmer. We didn’t think so. Ice flew off the front of the boat as we flew along, there was ice throughout the river and even with all the warm gear we had on, anything exposed just went numb.
From there, we travelled in the same direction to Arrowtown which, as Liam describes it, is “sovereign hill but without the $25 entry fee”. Every store looked like it was fake, it was just too perfect. The town was built to service the gold rush from ages ago, now it’s tourism only it seems. They certainly make good food! We stuffed ourselves silly at the cafe, the bakery, the sweets/lolly shop (sampled a lot of different fudges), ice cream shop (I had a dark chocolate truffle with wasabi – not bad!) and we somehow made it back to the car and not mistaken as beached whales. Actually we were thought to be the elephants of the sea yesterday as some of us couldn’t stand up on our snowboards so we had to do this rollover manouvre from our backs to our fronts… but I digress.
After that, we took some very nice photos of yet another mammoth lake, most of the group went shopping whilst Liam had a snooze (soft) and I went exploring and photographing evrything I could.
Tomorrow it’s off to the Franz Josef glacier. 5hr odd drive and we say goodbye to Queenstown unfortunately. It’s a fantastic city – I can see why so many stay longer than just their skiing holiday.