Queenstown

After our long trek out to Milford Sound and back, I abandoned my tentative plans to take a Lord of the Rings tour -- the last thing I wanted was to spend more time on a bus looking at pretty scenery.

So I spent our free day walking around Queenstown. It's basically a resort town dedicated to the consumption of that pretty scenery, often as a side effect of reckless behavior like dangling off a precipice with a giant rubber band around your feet or gliding hundreds of feet over the ground with only small parachute holding you up. I chose to ride the sky gondola to the top of Bob's Peak, which was more than enough to get my creaky adrenaline flowing.

Here's the view from the top: Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu.