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!

Travels

Wow, I cannot believe that my time working in Sydney has come to an end. My coworkers had an amazing farewell party on Friday night in the office - and then at The Australian Hotel for some dinner. Some of us stayed out dancing till the early morning. I'll share photos later on.

Sameer gets here on Thursday and we go straight to New Zealand. As we're not sure of computer / internet usage, this may be my last post for a month, but I'll be back with more after we're done travelling!

Blue Mountains

The Blue Mountains are not quite mountains and weren't very blue, but they were a beautiful expanse of lush, rolling hills. I did a Blue Diamond tour with friends a couple weeks ago, which picked us up in the city and drove the 1.5 hours or so to the Blue Mountains. This tour company was great and personal as we only had 11 people and it’s run by a husband and wife team – would definitely recommend it for anyone! It was nice not having to worry about logistics and all that jazz.

The weather looked ok in the morning but started to rain the minute we got to our first destination - Flat Rock. Next, after getting a bit cold and wet, we were all happy for our morning tea stop, where we had coffees and delicious scones with jam. 

Scones here are really more like biscuits. Biscuits here are cookies. Confused yet?

We reached the scenic area after tea, where we rode a few funky rides to see views of the Three Sisters and the rainforest. Despite the rainy weather, we were really lucky that the fog was confined to grazing the hills rather than engulfing the whole scene.

Here are some photos of the Three Sisters and the fog.

Here’s a bad picture of our guide walking us through the area that demonstrates the old coal town of the Blue Mountains. 

We walked through this beautiful rainforest – no better time to see it than when it’s raining!

This picture came out really dark, but shows the awesome twisted tree branches.

Waterfall.

Here’s me and Kali (our first picture together!) at Echo Point with the Three Sisters in the background.

Next, we went to an aboriginal centre where watched aboriginal men dancing and singing – it was great but unfortunately we couldn’t take any photos of the performance.

For lunch, we went to a sports club which is kind of like a country club of sorts but without the golf course or tennis courts or whatever. I had fish and chips – but forgot to take a photo.

After lunch was possibly the most horrific part of the day. We went to Featherdale Wildlife Park, were there are areas that they let kangaroos and wallabies roam free and have food you can buy to feed them. These aren’t the big kangaroos (as they would probably really attack you) but small kangaroos however it was rather scary having essentially large rats swarm you for food. 

Ahhhhhhhhhh!

Here's Daniel feeding a cute wallaby.

The best part, however, was seeing some of the kangaroos with joeys in their pouches. So cute!

The wildlife park is actually pretty cool as it has only animals indigenous to Australia. We saw a few other animals, including wombats, little penguins, dingoes and koalas. The dingo ate my baby (literally)!

Sleeping koala.

They took photos of us petting a koala, which is pretty special considering people aren't supposed to touch koalas in New South Wales – it’s against the law. Here's a photo of my koala photo.

This was a really nice day, great company and lovely getting out of the city into the fresh hill, er, mountain air.