NZ: Queenstown to Twizel

January 3, 2012

We woke up that morning to roosters crowing and a beautifully calm lake - a nice contrast to the night before. 

With our stomachs rumbling, we drove straight to Queenstown for some breakfast at Fergburger.  Ryan had the breakfast burger (egg, bacon, beetroot, hashbrown, and everything else you can think of for breakfast) and I had the Cockadoodle-oink burger.  It was delicious, but possibly too much food for 10:30am.  We didn't stick around in Queenstown, but instead proceeded on to another Lord of the Rings site: Pillar of the Kings.  The best place to see it from was the top of a bridge being used for bungie jumping, so we had some bonus entertainment.

When we originally planned our entire trip we expected to go to the glaciers on the NW coast of the South Island, but once we got driving we realized that wouldn't work out very well.  We instead decided to cut that part out and slow down our last few days of travelling.  On this particular day we didn't have a far destination, so we made a few random stops along the way.  The first was at one of the many cherry stands on the side of the road.  The cherries were expensive, but they were sooooo good that we ate the first container while parked in front of the stand and went back for another box.  The lady was wondering why we hadn't left, and was of course happy to sell us more cherries.

The second spontaneous stop we made was to play mini-golf in Cromwell.  It seems that recently Ryan and I have developed a love for the game, and now we find interesting courses hard to resist.  The course was next to this massive fruit sign and a "skate" park filled with kids on scooters.

The scenery was beautiful, but the course was relatively uninteresting.  It was really hot in the sun, and that was only made worse by how bad we were playing.  I kicked butt as retaliation for losing so badly on our trip to Perth, but both of our scores were appalling.  One perk was that we used the garden hose outside to fill up about 30 litres of water bottles.  Ryan, the man who is always prepared, kept freaking out that we would run out of water.  We were planning a big hike in the next few days and he thought we should fill up just in case.  The attendant lady was very friendly about it, and told us all about her son in Vancouver while we filled all of our jugs.

On we went to another pit stop at a large Marino wool store, but only ended up buying ice cream.  The drive that day was beautiful, and very different from the scenery we had seen in previous areas.  One particularly nice feature was the millions of purple lupins growing in the ditches on the side of the road.

I'm not sure what kind of flower this is.

Eventually we arrived in Omarama, where we had intended to camp for the night.  And this is where my rant about camping in New Zealand starts.

Really, the first stop was our own fault.  For some reason I let Ryan lead us to the free campsite on the side of a river, and didn't think anything of the fact that the description said it was under a bridge.  Yeah...turns out it was camping under the highway...like trolls.  A little shanty town of tents was already there, they had a scary looking dog, and they had pretty much surrounded the outhouse.  We were in complete shock, since we hadn't seen anything like this anywhere else.  Of course we didn't stay.

Next we went a bit further into town to a holiday park, which didn't go much better.  And neither did the third place we tried.  It looked like this:

We really couldn't believe it.  We had just spent the past week camping in beautiful spots, and then we had multiple failures in a row.  We drove by two other places, then decided to just try the next town.  We figured it was impossible for every site to look like this.  Of course we were wrong, or this wouldn't be a good story!

We drove to Twizel hungry and tired, vowing to stay at whatever park they had.  The lady at the front desk, when asked if there were any less populated areas of the campground, said "well, we have over 40 acres, so if you can't find somewhere you like then there's something wrong with you!"  I think it's fair to say it was the most ridiculous campground I have ever been to.  It looked like people were living there permanently; people had massive barbeques, dart boards on trees, and even fences around their own little area. 

I will admit I had a lot to drink that night (wine: Stella, Sauvignon Blanc, Central Otago, 2009 - not great), but I swear I'm not making this up - an ice cream truck drove by our tent!

The next morning we were leafing through a brochure that the mini-putt lady had given us and I checked out the section on camping - to see if we were just missing something.  Nope!  Turns out this was exactly the kind of camping we should have expected!  It's hard to see, but turns out the family in the bottom picture has the exact same striped campervan awning as our campsite neighbours.  Boy, do I have a renewed love for camping in Canada.