Queentown - Part 1

Wow, I've been back in the states for over almost two months. I still can't even believe that my time in Australia is over and that my trip with Sameer is over, also. Time really flies when you're having fun.

My last day of work in the Sydney office was on June 29. I stayed at Pilar's for a few days - where I sat on the couch and successfully watched the first 2 seasons of Mad Men in about 3 days - and then met Sameer at the airport on July 5th. We flew straight to Queenstown, NZ to begin our trip!

I plan to continue this blog to document my trip with Sameer in New Zealand for 2 weeks and Australia for 1.5 weeks - so here we go.

This is an accurate description of how Sameer and I felt at the airport after not seeing each other for 4 months - Sameer: excited and positive (per usual), me: anxious to get on the plane and get to NZ!

Just landing in Queenstown was amazing. Our little plane felt like it was swerving through the mountains to land. 

When we got in, we checked into our Novotel hotel, which was the first of two nights we stayed in a hotel over 3.5 weeks. It was really nice for that first night and in a great location in town. Once we were settled, we walked around the town and got dinner. The mountains surrounding Queenstown and also the lake are so beautiful. Here are some photos from right where our hotel was.

For dinner, we ate at Winnie's, which we found in my Lonely Planet. Thank god for that book! We tried our first NZ brewed beers, Monteith's. Really great beer.

We loved the pizza at Winnie's, one was all meaty and italiany while the other was veggies like squash and peppers with goat cheese.

Random artifacts around the restaurant.

The next morning, we checked out of our hotel (sad) and went to our hostel, Butterfli Lodge. This was a pretty good hostel, but a bit too far away from the downtown area and we had to walk up a hill to get there, which was a lot with our luggage. The hostel had a wonderful view of the lake and town.

We went to breakfast at Vudu Cafe, where Sameer had his first delicious latte.

Here's my flat white.

Little spoons!

Here's my poached eggs with sausage and Sameer's scrambled eggs with toast and potatoes.

More little spoons!

Our new camera has a great panorama feature, we used this a ton over our whole trip. Here's the Queenstown harbor.

We took the gondola up to Bob's Peak, which is a hill right in Queenstown off of which people go bungy jumping and paragliding. It also has a great view of the town.

So many places to go.

Sameer was very excited about Man Street.

After Bob's Peak, we walked to the Queenstown Gardens, which is a peninsula jutting into the lake on the side away from our hostel. If you look closely here, we saw Little Sebastian from Parks and Rec!

Here's the view from the other side of the lake.

After walking around all day, we were pooped. So we went food shopping and ate at the hostel that night. Especially because we had to wake up at 5:45 the next morning to go on our Milford Sound tour. Stay tuned!