Queenstown... hmm

This was taken from part way up the hill - great views... honest

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This is an odd place, its the party town of the south island, at least from here you can do all sorts of wild white knuckle trips, see Lord of the rings locations by various methods - or do as I did and ignored all of the above.

My first night out of 2 planned was staying at a hostel I hated (had to happen once), so after that, I moved to a nicer hostel, just up the hill rather than directly in front of the gorgeous lake that Queenstown is built around.

Saying "up the hill", could, of course, be in almost any direction, since Queenstown is situated round one part of a lake, surrounded my hills in all other directions, all facing the lake, but I knew the next place would be ok, since the hostel owners had a dog and about 3 cats there all in great condition (lets see how many read an earlier post for reasons why I knew that :-p)

Even from the town centre, the sunset and views are really great

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The good news, is that there really isn't that many photo's, I hiked up one of the larger hills (felt like a mountain at the time....) and the view from the top was amazing, there was only one problem, my camera only had 4 or 5 picture slots left, so I took a landscape video of it - so you are spared the hundreds of photos I normally take!

Its lucky that this town has the rep of being a party town as days of the week merge into one, there is no Monday to Friday and then a weekend, it's just one large weekend to me - sorry to rub it in - so as I went into town, I realised it was a Sunday - oops, but with all the cheap backpacker labour, almost all the shops were open - hooray!

Which of course just proves me wrong when I posted before about all shops closing at the weekends... ahh well, I don't mind admitting I was wrong.

Even the bugs can be pretty - but not the sandflies....

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Finally, this was the first hostel that I have stayed in, where there were bunk beds, when we are kids, we love the idea of bunk beds and people fight over who sleeps in the top bunk, so at what point is that lost?  Since all backpackers will pick the bottom bunk over the top one, without fail.

That childhood glee of climbing up and getting the "bagsie" on the top bunk seems to be replaced with a look of "now how am I going to get into this bed, without waking the rest of the dorm" look.... I guess it's proof that backpackers aren't just a bunch of kids who refuse to grow up hey....

Ahh well, a few photo's of Queenstown but also of the surrounding area (basically heaped them all into one)....can be found here