Night in Queenstown

Having a window seat on the plane as you come in to Queenstown is a definite advantage, there's some fairly spectacular scenery to be seen.  It's not too much of a stretch to see why they are called the 'Remarkables'

Met up with my brother at the airport after about a ten minute wait, it's almost as if we knew what we were doing when we planned that, then took the $10 shuttle in to town.

Our accommodation for the evening was a place called the Hippo lodge (their dog used to be called Hippo for the record).  We knew when we booked it that it was up a steep hill, we considered this to be Milford track training, but I'm not sure you'd appreciate it if you didn't know that.  In fact we met many a person walking up that hill cursing the fact that they had booked there.  The room was quite spacy, and for all intensive purposes there was an ensuite (since it was only a metre out the bedroom door)

I think the bottom line for Queenstown is that it is a town set up to suck dry the wallet of all visitors, it's quite a beautiful town so if anywhere should do it, then why not Queenstown.

 However there are so many activites one can do, that if you get carried away, and then buy the photos of said activity, then buy the making of the photos DVD....well you get the idea anyway, your money will be gone.

First day was very much a lazy "have beers down by the water, and anywhere else we can find" kind of day. Dinner at the Speights Ale house was delicious, followed by a few pints over the road at the Pig and Whistle took us both to the point where sleep was going to be quite easy

Accommodation

Hippo Lodge (http://www.hippolodge.co.nz/)

4 Anderson Heights, Queenstown, Phone: 03 442 5785

Nice enough place, just up a really, really steep hill