Queenstown, South Island

Now, I know what you are saying, did you bungee jump? What about the jet boat? To lay your questions to rest, no, we didn’t bungee jump (everyone has their excuses and my back and money are our ones =o) ) and the jet boat didn’t peak our interest. However, we did go river surfing down the Kawarau River, and it was so much more fun than the brochure made it look! You are on a boogie board, with yes, a wetsuit, and flippers. Then you head into the water and try to catch every wave you can! We were doing barrel rolls, flips and lots of fun stuff. I pretty much smiled the entire time we were in the river! In our trip we even had some non-swimmers where the guides helped them through. Ask Mike about the guy with the snot. =0). A fun day was certainly had by all! (http://www.riversurfing.co.nz/ )
We also went downtown a couple times. What a lively and beautiful place! (And with some fantastic ice cream I might add) The city center is a lovely harbor on Lake Wakatipu. In a good way, there were people always around, which made for some really fun people watching (like the lady sportin’ some neon green pants and top with red shoes). In a “what the heck” moment, we decided to go to the “Minus 5 Ice Bar” which is one of the bars where everything is completely made out of ice. I could have been lame, but we had so much fun!
On our last day, we went horseback- riding up in Glenorchy with High Country Horses. Before we even got on the horses, there was an amazing rainbow that arched over the horses and into the valley. Just beautiful. We rode through rivers, in meadows and basins, past mountains that were filmed in Lord of the Rings, and through gorgeous (though highly invasive) purple, pink and white lupine. We were able to canter a bit, but we were both a bit disappointed that there were no exploration opportunities and few chances to ride faster than the slowest rider.
We both liked our horses, but not was honkey-dorey with all the horses. There was this one brown horse that was racist against black horses. Seriously. We wouldn’t have believed it either until we saw it. He would chase and bite at black horses and try and jockey his way up the line of horses to get to a black one. The guides had to be very careful about placement of horses around them. The racist horse even went after Mike’s horse once! Mike was good at controlling his horse, though admittedly, he was on the biggest scaredy cat-horse of them all, but another lady on a black horse had a bit of a fright! Our bums hurt at the end of the day, but we thought it was worth it!
So far, we had been very lucky with the vehicle. No damage what-so-ever, which was good because we decided not to take out full insurance. Yeah, we know. On our drive from Queenstown to Franz Josef, our luck turned. An oncoming campervan (a Backpacker campervan I believe it was), kicked up a stone and cracked the front windshield. At first, we thought maybe, just maybe they wouldn’t notice it or maybe we could put mud on it and they wouldn’t see it. However, as time went on, the crack got longer and longer and our frowns got deeper and deeper. We could just cross our fingers and hope for a blind inspector in Christchurch.