Snowboarding in Queenstown

We arrived in Queenstown (New Zealand) on Saturday afternoon. The approach via plane was just magnificent! We crossed the mountain range that runs through the whole southern island and finally landed in this beautiful valley. It really looks like Hobbit land :-)

The view from our apartment (left upper pic) was also quite good. But as you can see there is something missing…. SNOW!! It was lovely spring weather with up to 16°C so we wondered what it would be like on the slopes…

The next day we drove up to “The Remarkables”. I mean the view from the top of the mountain was just great but we were a little bit shocked how less snow there was. The car park was just muddy. A couple of days before we arrived the temperatures rose and the snow melted so the slopes were icy in the morning and slushy at midday. But it was alright much better than expected. And I improved my snowboarding abilities; I can do both turns now and started to link turns.

The second day we snowboarded in the rain! Something we both never done before ;-) We hoped that the dark clouds would bring snow but it was to warm – just above zero.

The bird you can see on this picture is a parrot called kea. It loves cars or maybe it is just bored. But it stripes the plastic or rubber of the cars. Pretty funny to watch if it is not your car :-)

On the third day it rained so much that we decided to do some sightseeing. We drove up to Wanaka and went to the airplane museum “War Birds” and to the “Puzzling World”.

They had a tilted house and walking inside this tilted house was really funny. Water and billiard balls are running or rolling uphill and one can stand straight on stairs and it looks tilted.

Another attraction is the room of the following faces. These faces are actually impressions in the walls but it looks like as if they are protruding and they follow you all the time.

And there was also this labyrinth were you had to visit all 4 corner towers before finding the exit. We did this in just 15min instead of the approximated 1h by just walking left all the time. This method works really well!

The other night we went to this restaurant hidden in the back streets of Queenstown called “The Cow”. It is a great (mainly) pizza restaurant!! [Read this for a description] This night there were a couple of blokes playing this “cow game”. One started by putting on a very nice cow suit with a really fancy plastic udder. Now he had to walk around the restaurant trying to persuade others to wear this cow suit for a while. It was a good laugh and his “moo” sounded quite real :-) Eventually he found another guy.

On the last day we drove up to “Cardrona”

where we had the best snowboarding of this holiday! There was a little bit more snow then at the Remarkables and much more runs were open. And we could watch the Coca Cola Cardrona Games where snowboarders and skiers compete.