I slept a few hours in a park last night and was on the road early to head to Queenstown. Queenstown is the epicenter of outdoor adventures. There are dozens of outfitters in the city. Here is an example of a sign advertising the services offered
On the way into town I started seeing all these deer farms? It turns out that the export of venison from feral deer started in the 1960s, turning a pest into an export earner. Industry pioneers saw an opportunity to build on this base and in the early 1970s started capturing live deer from the wild and farming them. A new industry was born and rapidly spread throughout New Zealand
Driving towards Queenstown, I began to realize that there are very few new cars. Most are from the 90’s and come from Japan. I guess with so few people and the difficulty of shipping it makes sense.
I lost my notes for today, so this will prove to be a shorter one. I arrived in Queenstown and it was raining. I found a laundromat and cleaned everything. Around noon I walked the waterfront town
I stumbled into this art gallery, Vesta Design. It also happened to be the oldest building in the city
I headed over to the waterfront district where there were plenty of street vendors hawking their goods
Here are examples of the Native Maori Greenstone jewelry. This is classic NZ stuff. You see hundreds of foreigners wearing these stones as necklaces. I like to take home traditional art, but I am not much on wearable art. They also use some of this greenstone in war clubs and tools, but the cost is through the roof
Here is a link to the description of these rocks
A couple nice shots of a tourist steamer
I stopped for a beer to take in the view
They have this place called “Furburger”. It apparently is an institution. It has its own wiki page . The line was ridiculous so I kept moving
By now the throng of tourists from Japan and China were driving me crazy and I needed to escape. I had a couple hikes set up in Queenstown that extended from a Gondola ride up a nearby hill, but with the sky overcast there was really no incentive.
I heard of a place called Arrowtown, just north of here that was a little less crowded and had some small town charm. Within about 30 minutes I was in Arrowtown. It consisted of one street full of historic buildings
I walked up and down and settled on a place where I could sit outside and watch the locals. There seemed to be some sort of kids harvest festival going on. Pumpkins in April, what has the world come to!
I checked out a couple bars and found a carpark outside of town and was in bed early.
Until Tomorrow
Darren
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