Queenstown Hill

I guess you could consider this another installment of our virtual tour of Queenstown (which we'll hopefully finish someday), but another quasi-interesting thing to do in town is hike up Queenstown Hill. The hill is one of a few that hover over town, and this one has a nice, albeit quite steep, 3-hour return hike to the top. Nice day, nothing to do, so we finally decided to make the trek to the top. There's not really anything up there but a nice view, so we sat and enjoyed that for a while.

Lake Wakatipu looking towards Glenorchy. Fernhill is on the side of the hill on the right. Queenstown Gardens is in the lower left.

Lake Wakatipu looking towards Kingston. The cluster of houses you see is Kelvin Heights, on the other side of the Frankton Arm from us.

What else has been going on? Oh yes, Halloween. It is celebrated here, but didn't seem quite as big as in the US. Apparently the kids do trick-or-treat, but neither of us were here to see if anyone came by. They sure didn't sell hordes of candy at the grocery store like back home, which was of course disappointing to us. There are tons of backpackers in town, most of them younger than us, so dressing up and going out was certainly a popular thing to do. Steph had to work, and I went to a little barbeque by the lake with that guy Stephen from Buckhead (also, he went to Westminster, not Wesleyen). He had a couple high school buddies in town, one of them even went to Tech, so I got the chance to talk a little Yellow Jacket football which was nice. Also met a couple guys that live in town from LaGrange. That makes at least 6 people in town from the state of Georgia. Plus another one of the river boarding guys is from Aiken. I've yet to meet any Americans from outside a 200-mile radius of Atlanta.

Speaking of river boarding, it is going good. I'm up to just over 30 trips total now, so still a while to go. There are trips going pretty much every day now, sometimes two trips a day, so it should be pretty easy to complete my last 20 trips. I think I'm enjoying it more and more every time I go, so am really pumped for summer. Steph came out to watch a couple days ago and took some video of us going down the river. In the video below, we're going through the third named rapid on our run, called "Dead Cow" because there used to be a dead cow stuck on the rock. First I briefly "surf" on a small wave at the top, then go through a "squirt" called "Elevator to Hell". A squirt is caused by two currents of water crashing into each other, so a large flow of water is forced down to the bottom of the river. You put your board under and if you time it right, it will pull you underwater for up to 10 seconds or more. We do this for fun. The guy with the crazy accent yelling at me in the video is Sean, from Zimbabwe.