January 2025, Part 12

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January 2025 (Part 12)

New Zealand Trip - Day Eleven: Queenstown and Glenorchy

Adventures By Disney - Day Ten: A Remarkable Day

The day's theme is a play on words with the local Remarkables Mountain Range, which greeted us with the view from our hotel balcony. We headed out of Queenstown along the coast of Lake Wakatipu toward Glenorchy. This was a really curvy road with yet more one lane bridges, so we were glad to stop at an overlook spot.

Loved the reflections of the mountains in the placid lake, well at least before a breeze came up.

We were headed to Glenorchy, which is at the junction where the Dart River feeds into the lake. After an enjoyable pub lunch, we were going jet-boating with Dart River Adventures up the Dart River into the Te Waipounamu World Heritage area and Mt. Aspiring National Park.. This may have been our favorite activity on the trip, both for the adventure aspect and scenery. The jet boat had two V-8 engines powering jet drives like a JetSki, so it could go in very shallow areas (as low as 6 inches once it was on a plane) and an aluminum hull which could scrape over the gravel stream bed left by the glaciers. They split our group into two boats and we wound up leap-frogging each other up the river. The trip guide talked about crystal clear waters, not sure where that came from as the river was clouded with heavy silt from the glacier runoff.

We took a couple minutes to get oriented with our pilot, Andres, who was from Australia. He, like the other pilots, had been raft guides in the area for a while before piloting the jet boats. We had some fun doing spins before heading into the river, which involved running over a narrow sand /gravel bar.

The river is one of the ancient Maori sources of Pounamu. Saw the stone in the second picture with some clear traces of it.

We eventually stopped at a small gravel bar at the junction of the Dart River and a small clear water stream (not glacier fed) which came from Lake Unknown. A nice spot to get out. we could even wade into the stream, at least until our feet went numb in the frigid water.

Passed a funyak headed down river.

Here are some pictures from the GoPro or clipped from GoPro video.

Some fun stuff in their store.

That night we walked around Queenstown a bit. Loved this window outside an Irish Pub. We took the opportunity to walk around Queenstown Gardens around the other side of the bay. Found a nice spot to take a rest on a bench along the shore.

We made our way up to the top of the point and wandered through the gardens before heading into town for dinner. Some more mandatory bee pictures to send to Lexi.