Week 2 in our Camper - Views, views and more views

We left Wanaka and headed onto Queenstown for a couple of days.  We had read that Queenstown is ‘one of the most beautiful towns in the world’ and it didn’t disappoint.  Surrounded by imposing mountains, the town is wrapped around the mandatory blue lake.  Quaint bars and restaurants, extreme sports but the tourist numbers to go along with it.  A little busy but only by NZ standards - if Queestown was in Israel, it would be the most relaxing town in the country.  

The weather wasn’t great so we took the chance to catch up on laundry, grabbed some fish and chips and then headed to our campsite, on Lake Moke.  Beautiful location, completely isolated, almost mo other campers there and a field full of horses for the kids to play with. Sitting having a cold beer, looking at the mountains, it was definitely one of the moments when you think ‘this is the life’ (these moments seem to be daily in NZ).

 
By this point on our journey, we were kind of winging it.  No real plan other than knowing a few key places we wanted to get to.  One of them was Milford Sound, which Rudyard Kipling once described as ‘The 8^th Wonder of the World’.    The drive from Queenstown is around 6 hours so we stopped overnight in the small village of Lumsden at a nice campsite with hot showers (massive luxury when camping here, amazing how even the most basic things become luxury).

The next day we drove onto Milford Sound, where we had booked a boat trip.  The drive itself was spectacular enough.  The boat trip had the 'wow' factor (although Shoshi wasn't as impressed as the rest of us), the scale of the fiord is hard to comprehend from photos, although seeing how the Cunard Queen Elizabeth cruise ship appears like a tug boat gives some idea. Just a breathtaking part of the world.

We then spent 2 days in Te Anau, the main town in this part of Southland, again, great views, very quiet.  We walked the first 4 hours of the Kepler Track, along the shores of Lake Te Anau, through Lords of The Rings type forest with plenty of poisonous Disney-esque mushrooms.

From Te Anau, we stopped again overnight in Lumsden and headed back for 2 days in Queenstown.  It was our last 2 days in the camper and also coincided with Eyal’s birthday on 31^st March so we wanted to be somewhere with a little life-support and also where we could do a couple of special treks.  So we spent two nights on a beautiful campsite on the lake, mountain views, blah blah blah…I’m boring myself now.

In Queenstown, we climbed The Remarkables, the main ski resort in winter which currently has no snow, making it a great trekking area.  The drive up to 1600m was a steep climb, then the walk and scrabble up to 2100m was challenging but rewarded buy panoramic views of Queenstown and the surrounding mountains.  This was a tough climb, it took us around 5 hours but definitely worth the effort.

Our second hike was the much more relaxed Queenstown Hill, a 3 hour walk up to this iconic hill which overlooks the town.  At 700m, it isn’t very impressive or challenging but the views were brilliant and, as Shoshi and I have discovered, we can’t batter the kids everyday with 5/6 hour climbs.  They need some time to recover, not physically but definitely psychologically from the thought of yet another day in the mountains.

 The following morning, we said ‘goodbye’ to our home for the previous 2 weeks, our Jucy Camper, and picked up our hire car.  It had been an brilliant time, we learned how to live in a confined space of about 8m² and not kill each other.  If nothing else, that was an achievement beyond anything else we have done in the 6 months to date.