Queenstown is awesome! It is alive, fun, easy to navigate, and absolutely beautiful. I love how it is a town built on a brilliantly blue lake nestled between two of the most beautiful mountain ranges I've ever seen. The plethora of activities and heaps of adventure-seeking travelers make Queenstown quite an exciting place!
While Kearse headed to Nevis for his 134-meter bungy jump (the highest bungy in New Zealand), I went jet boating on the Shotover River that winds through Skipper's Canyon. Not as crazy as the bungy, that's for sure, but still a really fun trip. Imagine zooming up river at the bottom of a canyon in a cigarette boat with wind whipping at your face and cold glacier water spraying into the boat, and you've got jetboating. The boat driver also did some some pretty sweet 360's. Looks like I've got some new moves to try out with Dad's boat this summer!
So let's see, the Shotover River is the fastest flowing river in NZ, and it was also the most productive gold mining river in the world until gold was discovered in the Yukon in Alaska in 1890. The road down into Skipper's Canyon is a single-lane gravel road, built on steep cliffs with no shoulder and high drop offs. Only specially licensed drivers and vehicles are allowed on the road, which means that all rental vehicles are absolutely prohibited. How exciting! This road was built by the gold miners to access the river, and the only means of transportation on the road before tourism were ponies and carts.
Here's the crazy thing- as we jetboated up the river, we whizzed by huge metal scraps and fragments that were left by the miners a hundred years ago. Large pieces of rusted piping, rail fragments, and bridge spans were all left just laying on the river banks, and even smack dab in the middle of the river. It was a mess! We also zoomed under two bridges that were the second and third bungy jumps in New Zealand. These bridges are now closed for safety reasons and also due to competition from the Nevis bungy.
One of the coolest parts of the trip was when the driver stopped the boat at a Lord of the Rings filming location. This particular part of the Shotover River was used to portray the Ford of Bruinen, one of the most dramatic scenes in The Fellowship of the Ring when Arwen ferried Frodo across the river on her horse while being chased by the Nazgul monsters. In fact, the magical flood that Arwen invoked to fight off the Nazgul in the film was eerily echoed in reality when a flash flood in the area swept away part of the set during the filming.
Also, just outside of Queenstown is a large conical hill called Deer Park Heights. I didn't get to see this area, but apparently the top of this hill is one gigantic movie set. Scenes from all three LOTR films, as well as several "pick-up" shots, were filmed here, such as a sequence depicting Gandalf riding to Minas Truth on the West Road to Gondor, the exit wall from the Paths of the Dead, the large rock wall where the Warg scout jumped off and killed Hama, where Gimli was thrown from his runaway horse, where the Wargs and Riders from Rohan clashed, where Legolas did his jump onto his horse before battle, where Legolas fired his first arrows at the Wargs, where Rohirrim Refugees were led to safety, and my personal favorite, the cliff face that Aragorn was dragged over during battle (probably my favorite because it meant that Viggo Mortensen was here). Fun fact: there's no river at the bottom of this cliff, just grass. The river sequence was filmed at the nearby Kuwaru River.
Upon leaving Queenstown that evening, the steering wheel in our van started shaking back and forth. We got the van looked at, luckily, as the driver side tire (haha the front right tire) had a bulge in it that could have exploded at any time. What a lovely camper van. Actually, both front tires were ten-years-old, but were only certifiable up to six years, so we spent the remainder of the evening at the car repair place and on the phone with the rental company. Good times. We ended up having to drive an hour out to Wanaka on the spare tire in order to pick up the new tires. Good thing Wanaka was on the way to our next destination- the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers!
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