Day 51 – Queenstown

I got woken up by various alarms from about 6.30am even though it seemed no one actually left my room until about 9am, so that was a delightful morning. Carina had told me the night before she and a friend were going to hire a bike and cycle to Arrowtown, as I’m not the biggest cyclist in the world and I knew it would take about 2 hours to get there, I went for the easy and lazy option of getting the bus which would take about 40minutes. There was a quick change at Frankton but other than that the journey was relatively easy.

I arrived before they did so just took a stroll around. There isn’t a lot in Arrowtown but it was a beautiful little place. It’s mostly just all on one street and the best way to describe it is the Wild Wild West. The whole place made you want to ride around on a horse, wearing a cowboy hat with lasso’s and guns. Obviously I didn’t get a chance to do any of that but hey, a girl can dream. About an hour after I arrived Carina rang and said they had just stopped at a café, which I happened to be outside of, I bought myself a refreshing iced tea and enjoyed the lovely weather. Blue skies, pure sunshine, it was exactly what the doctor ordered, well Vitamin D is good for you isn’t it?

We then walked around the old Chinese settlement, this contained a number of little huts, some were built into the hillside and others just on flat land. These are where people used to live and work, they were quite cool to look at, kinda felt like I was walking around Hobbiton again.

They left me just before 4 and from reading the timetable I expected a bus to arrive at 4.05pm… silly me was looking at the wrong side of the timetable and that’s what time a bus left Queenstown, so I actually had to wait until 4.50. Good news was on the way back I didn’t need to change at Frankton so it was just a straight ride through.

I arrived back in Queenstown with just enough time to walk to Nomads, knock on Rach & Charli’s door and then queue for the free dinner. I know I’m not staying there but they don’t check and it means A) I didn’t have to cook, B) I didn’t have to pay for it and C) I didn’t have to eat alone, a win win situation! Like every evening at Nomads although the dinner isn’t ready until 6pm a queue starts to form from about 5.40 or so, so we joint it knowing we’d be stood there for 20 minutes, the things you do for free food but we are also British so it’s just in our nature to start and join queues. The dinner was Chilli and we where we were close to the front we managed to re-join and get seconds.

It was my (and a few others) final night in Queenstown and Hayley’s birthday so we all met at the so-called ‘Wisdom River’ for drinks and then moved onto Buffalos.