South Island Tour

We spent the 5 days before Christmas touring the south island. Our first stop was Lake Pukaki on our way to Queenstown. We were lucky to get a view of Mt. Cook (NZ’s highest peak) down the lake (see picture). We then drove on to Queenstown, which is probably the adventure tourism capital of the world. They invented bungy jumping here and the town is filled with the normal tourist stuff plus bookings for riding America’s Cup yachts, steamships, jet boats, planes, helicopters, parasails (riding a parachute behind a boat), paragliders (riding a parachute off a mountain with a pilot), gondolas, luge (roll down a concrete path on a wheeled sled), and various other ways to spend large sums of money to scare yourself in a beautiful setting.

While the town itself certainly deserves its tourist reputation, the scenery is so expansive and awe inspiring, that just looking up at the Remarkables (Dimrill Dale in the Lord of the Rings) or out across Lake Wakatipu reminds you why Queenstown is really special. Of course, we think bungy jumping and paragliding are special too. Lily bungy jumped off of Kawarau bridge (see film) repeating her Uncle Mike’s feat during bungy jumping’s first year.

Later, Karen parasailed off of the mountain peak and over the lake with her new friend “Mike”. While bungy jumping seems to be of interest to both men and women, the paragliding queue was dominated by women. There may be some deep psychological reason that women are drawn to paragliding, but I think that they are less intimidated by having a 20 something male adventure guide strapped doggy style to their posterior than most men are.

After two nights in Queenstown, we drove to Te Anau (Tee-ann-ow) as the staging area for our Milford Sound trip the next day. We left Te Anau at 6 AM to catch our 9AM boat tour. It was beautiful beyond description. Words or photos simply don’t do it justice, but you can see our photos at the FLKR link.

After our boat trip we drove across the island to Dunedin and stayed at a downtown hotel for a change. We had a truly urban experience with dinner at a sidewalk café and a morning tour of the Cadbury chocolate factory on Christmas Eve. The attraction of touring the chocolate factory should be self evident, but it turned out to be one of those scenes where you end up being sympathetic to the poor person assigned the task of making a factory tour an “attraction”. For example, being asked to surrender your cameras and phones before the tour, gives you the early impression that you are about to see some secret special thing. Anticipation continues to build as the tour guide points to the storage silo across the lot and states that she can’t reveal what the silo contains since it’s the highlight of the tour. Twenty minutes later when you are standing in front of the third wall display that uses big arrows to show how cocoa, milk, and sugar are combined to make chocolate, you understand that they took your camera not to protect trade secrets, but to keep people from Googling lame factory tours, and seeing your photos.

But in the back of your mind, you’re thinking about the silo. After walking up the spiral stair case inside the silo you finally reach the top. The lights are turned down low and a single spotlight shines on a large valve about 20 feet above your head. Kids are moved to the front so that they can see the upcoming event. A button is pushed and a large stream of chocolate comes out of the valve and pours down the center of the silo through a series of buckets. While I’ve never been attracted to chocolate fountains as a gift idea, I always assumed that the attraction was something along the fondue line, where the objective was to think of something novel to stick in the flowing chocolate and then eat it. After seeing the “largest known chocolate waterfall in the southern hemisphere”, I guess there must be something more that attracts folks to flowing chocolate. Since you can’t take photos at the Cadbury factory, the only way to meet this need at home is to buy your own chocolate fountain. It’s another one of those things where you wish you could have been at the meeting where someone suggested “why don’t we dump a ton of chocolate down a silo”, so that you could have heard what the bad ideas were.