Day 45 – Wanaka to Queenstown

9am bus out of Wanaka and as usual we always end up sitting at the back even though we’re never the last on the bus… I’m not quite sure how this ends up. We took a short drive down the road until we arrived at Puzzling world. It had its 40^th birthday last year and they say is one of the most photographed places in New Zealand. It had an illusion room, a maze and other silly things. The best bit was a room where when you look at it from one end the people on the left look massive in a small room and the people on the right are very small in a big room. It kind of makes no sense when you describe it but it was quite funny to look at.

Our next stop on the journey was at a fruit shop in the middle of nowhere, we were recommended to try the real fruit ice cream and oh my god, it was incredible! So good that I couldn’t finish it all as there was way too much. I went for fresh pineapple with vanilla ice cream.

Today was one of the shortest journeys on the south circuit as we arrived just outside Queenstown around midday. Our stop was at the AJ Hackett bungy jump centre as a couple of people were jumping off the Kawarau Bridge which is the oldest bungy jump in New Zealand and is 43metres high. The rest of us watched whilst Gary sorted out payment for everyone else’s bungys and swings. Kirsty and Francesca were 2 of the people jumping today so I was called in as cameraman. They said it was amazing but it still doesn’t really appeal to me… I’m doing a canyon swing instead though, so that’s pretty extreme.

After an hour or so we were ready to leave, meaning we only had 10 minutes or so left on our last bus together and with Gary because of this we had a group photo by the lake in Queenstown. It was kind of a pyramid but just laying on top of each other, it was quite funny, especially everyone trying to get back up again.

We are staying at Nomads and our room is quite nice. There are 6 of us in here but we have a balcony that we can actually use if we want to which is cool, because most balcony’s we’ve had you can’t walk out on.

We wondered around the town and grabbed some lunch in a nearby restaurant. We all thought the weather down here was going to be quite naff but it’s actually been warmer and nicer than the North Island.

Gary had organised us a bus night out so we all met in the Red Rock, then went onto Loco and from there we ended in The Find.