Anzac Day in Queenstown

The long journey from Franz Josef to Queenstown must have worn us out pretty badly. That night, after we cooked ourselves noodle with some yucky canned beef, we went to the pub where we go 1 for 1 beer by showing our backpacker's key. We watched some hilarious and some really gross Jackass episodes at the pub for a while. Oh, on a side note, we bumped into George outside the pub. He was going for dinner and would join his friends somewhere.

When we were back at the backpackers, I was so beaten and must have knocked out slightly after 9 before yd even switched off the light. Little did I know he was far more beaten......

Check out the ink-stained t-shirt of his, and the stains he left on the backpacker's bed! Apparently, he fell asleep writing his journal and had been tossing and turning around on the uncapped pen. Luckily they didn't charge us extra for the mess!

Today, we were going to meet up with Koo and heading back to Christchurch with her in her newly bought car! It meant temporarily end of our hitch hiking days. We checked out the backpackers and left our backpacks at the storage and planned to visit Arrowtown which was close by. Autumn Arrowtown was listed as one of the must visit on the AA guide book. So we decided not to miss that.

Out on the street, the Anzac Day parade took place.

a solemn little marcher

After some discussion, we decided to go up the sky gondola in Queenstown which was also one of the top ten spots recommended in the guide book, then hitch hike to arrowtown which was only 17km (or was it 7?) away. Arrowtown was a gold mining town back in 1860s. Today, it is a living historic town. The reason autumn is the best time to visit is because most of the trees in the town were introduced and hence change colours drastically in the fall. I learned from Bill that native plants usually tend to last longer and greener.

I saw some 'LOTR' rings on display.

two hang-gliders (or sky divers? i couldn't tell for sure) gliding through the blue sky

And guess what? We bumped into George AGAIN on our way! We were passing by a camp site, that we realised was the one George was staying, and voila, our dearest Mr. George appeared along in his campervan. We were laughing when we saw each other. He pulled over the road site and we exchanged email addresses. I mean, wasn't that some fate?

As we arrived at the sky gondola ticket counter, there was a long queue. But we didn;t have to wait long before we bought a combined ticket of returned gondola ride plus one luge ride. We had no idea how a luge ride was but it was pretty cheap, NZ$7 per ride.

While waiting for the gondola (or cable car as we used to call), some milks found their way to get a free ride before us.

It was getting misty and cloudy as we went up. Later, it started drizzling.

the lift to luge ride

the ugly luge ride gear
Turned out the luge ride was really fun though a little short. We couldn't get enough of it and went on a second ride. I wished they didn't have the no racing rule! :D

There was this bird park where one could see the very rare kiwi and other exotic birds. But guess how much was the entreance fee? NZ$30++ per person!!! Crazy! Anyway we weren't really crazy about birds let alone the fact that we were running low on our fund.

lesson learned - gamblers often are lossers

We fell for the marketing gimmick! On our way coming down the sky gondola, I saw this poster stating one can get either a free drink or a 5 dollar max-up chip at the sky city casino. I talked yd into going to the casino. I figure we could use the 10 dollar chip and try our luck, who knows we might strike big and then I could go for the Shotover Canyon Swing and he could go for the photography tour he had been eyeing. And if we loss, we loss the $10 which was in the first place never ours. Sounds wise right? But, nope!! In the end we lost $20, from our pockets! Turned out the max-up chip was only meant for adding $5 to the bet. Meaning it can only be used with the normal chips. And our smallest change was $20 when we bought the chips. ANd if you had been to casino before, you would know that they don't give change for buying chips. So in the end, we bought $20 worth of chips to play on $5 table. And we lost all after 2 hands each. All I can say was it's plain shitty. Can you imagine when I got 21, the dealer actually got black jack? Crap! So in the end, not only did we not win big for the activities, but we were $20 poorer. And they didn't have free coffee/tea and toast in there!!! All they have for free was iced water with lemon wedges!!! WTF! That's plain rip-off!

And it didn't help when we saw this right outside the casino. $10 lunch special. We could have 1 each! But nope, we were eating Budget biscuits instead. (no kidding, the brand was called Budget)

To find out what happened after that, come back next time to check out for new post! :P (it's really late as I'm blogging this and I still got to attend some seminar tomorrow morning...sorry)