A 6.15 wake up (I think I woke at 4.30 🙄) ready for a 7am departure from Christchurch. It was going to be a long day, but I was hoping that the views would be worth it.
The first real viewing point was Lake Tekapo and The Church of the Good Shepherd. The views didn’t disappoint.
From Lake Tekapo we passed Lake Pukaki and headed up to Mount Cook. Sadly old Cooky wasn’t playing ball and hid behind the clouds. Whilst there we had a little bit of time so I had a little browse of the information centre. Mount Cook is the highest peak in New Zealand at 3,724 meters (12,218 feet) and was first was first climbed on December 25, 1894, by Tom Fyfe, George Graham, and Jack Clarke. The Hermitage hotel had a museum dedicated to Edmund Hillary. His most notable climb on Mount Cook (Aoraki) was his ascent of the south ridge in January 1948.
From Mount Cook we headed south to Queenstown past several mountain ranges and into Central Otago where I was greeted with the sights of vineyards 🍇🍷. We arrived into Queenstown at 6pm so missed the sunset, fingers crossed for good weather and stunning scenes tomorrow.
So the day was pretty uneventful, the hostel well its a hostel…as I walked into my 4 bed dorm there’s a boy (young man) sat in his boxers on the top bunk! You can imagine how I felt as I walked in and realised I’m also on the top bunk 🙅🏻♀️. Hopefully one of the two on the bottom bunks leaves tomorrow and I can do a cheeky swap. I did look on booking.com to see if there was an alternative – alas I couldn’t really justify over £300 for 3 nights when on one of the days I’m getting up early to go to Milford Sounds. So I made the adult decision to have wine and deal with it 😂😂🍷🍷.
Flying Solo 