After our golf tour in New Zealand we hired a car at Queenstown & had a further five days to look around the South Island. These photos are just a selection from those five days.
I am starting to update my travel blog now with more detailed photos of each place that we visited. To view go to http://www.janmartinstravelblog.blogspot.com/ or you can click on "view my profile" and select my travel blog from those listed. I hope to have all the New Zealand photos there in the next couple of weeks if not sooner. I am taking advantage of having some time to myself over the Easter break to do some catch up on these sort of things as well as my gardening.
After the golf tour finished in Queenstown the first place we visited was Kingston which is on the way to Invercargill. At Kingston they have the railway station for the famous Kingston Flyer which is a steam train that will take you on a short trip through the countryside.
We stayed at Invercargill the first night. While there we visited the very end of New Zealand - a little place called Bluff which had some interesting history. At Invercargill we visited Queens Park gardens and the Museum. At the museum we saw Burt Munro's original racing bike and memorabilia & watched a 20 minute video when Burt Munro was interviewed about his racing days. By coincidence I watched the "World's fastest Indian" movie on the plane over to NZ so his story was fresh in my mind. The weather was showery, cold and windy which is typical of Invercargill.
The next day we drove to Dunedin and spent one night there. We had a good look around the city and had a look at the St Clair Golf Course and of course "Baldwin Street" which is famous for being "The World's Steepest Street". The weather had not improved so we decided to head back towards Christchurch to where the weather looked much friendlier.
We stopped at Timaru for the night. It is a very pretty seaside place. We had a game of golf at "St Andrews" Golf Course. During the golf game the cold snap caught up with us & it dropped about 10 degrees in a few minutes so we were back in the "All weathers".
From Timaru we crossed the country heading for Wanaka via Lake Tekapo, Twizel and Omarama (our lunch stop). The temperature had dropped to 10 degrees and there was fresh snow on the tops of the mountains.
Wanaka was a lovely place so we stopped there for two days. We played golf at the Wanaka Golf Course which has a beautiful backdrop of ice blue lakes and mountains. We visited the tourist attraction they have there called "Puzzle World" which is an amazing experience.
It is a good alternative to Queenstown if you want a more peaceful setting but similar beauty.
We travelled back to Queenstown via Coronet Peak and Arrowtown to check out the mountain scenery. It was worth the effort as the views were spectacular.
The only thing wrong with New Zealand is the weather. Photographs cannot capture the true beauty of the place. It does rate as one of my favourite places to visit and Queenstown is my favourite place in all of New Zealand.
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