After a few days in Australia, we headed to Sydney airport to catch our flight to Queenstown in Qantas. We were surprised to find out we got fed a full meal (lunch) in economy on such a short flight (2 1/2 hours or so). The view over the mountains coming into Queenstown was spectacular! What an intro to this beautiful town!
We landed in Queenstown and had an efficient arrival – it’s a relatively small airport and we were prepared. We had our NZ ETA (New Zealand Electronic Travel Authority) already done in advance and you can also do your travel declaration in an app in advance as well (or on paper – they give you the form on the plan). The ETA is similar to what non-US citizens have to do coming into the US – it’s not a visa but it’s basically an approval for those who don’t need a visa (we got ours approved within 10-15 min of submitting it so it’s much less involved than a visa).
The travel declaration is for all travelers into NZ (even locals) to declare what they are bringing into the country. They are understandably quite strict and protective of their agriculture and ecosystem. If you are traveling to NZ, you need to apply for the ETA – which is $17 per person – and then you also pay a tourist fee of $100 IVL (International Conservation and Tourism Levy), which helps fund tourism infrastructure and support natural resources. With the exchange rate to US dollars, that ended up being about $67 each – not bad considering the resources we got to enjoy while there.
An important thing to note for these ETAs (for NZ, Australia, and the UK) – make sure you are going to the official page. If you google these, you often see a lot of “sponsored” sites that are not the official government site and we have seen several people in various travel groups pay significantly more on some of these fake sites. The official one for NZ is https://nzeta.immigration.govt.nz.
Once we got through customs and immigration, we headed outside to catch the bus into town. Most other places we have been recently allow you to “tap on, tap off” public transit with your credit card. In Queenstown, you can’t do that. They sell a Bee card that you can use instead (https://www.orc.govt.nz/orbus/fares/#Queenstown%20Airport%20buses; sold at a shop in the airport and also I think around town) or you can use cash. The Bee card is much cheaper though ($2.50 per person from the airport into town versus $10 each, and $2.50 around town versus $4; the card itself was $5 but you can use a single card for 2 people). The bus driver kindly directed us back into the airport to get a Bee card so we could save some money. The lady in the shop was also very helpful – you can put as much as you want on the card but you can’t get any refund of unused fare so she helped us figure out what we needed and we were on our way. By the way, that is all in NZ dollars ($1 NZ is only about 56 cents US – so the bus was really cheap!).
We got off the bus a couple blocks from our AirBnB and got settled in then went exploring. We were only a couple blocks from town but it was a rather steep couple of blocks! This was one of the trips back up from town…. (and yes – I was quite out of breath!). We quickly learned which routes were slightly less steep. And also learned from some locals that walking up it backwards was a little easier.
On our first full day there, we got up and went for a run along the water. This has to be one of the most beautiful places on earth!
We got back to the AirBnB and got cleaned up and had breakfast then headed out to check out the Skyline gondola – and the luge! (https://queenstown.skyline.co.nz) The views were amazing and the luge was lots of fun!
As you can see, Chris is a speed demon in this kind of vehicle too!
That night, we got a tip from someone in a NZ travel group we are in that we might be able to see the Southern Lights (aurora australis) so we ran outside to scope it out. Wow! We could see this from our street just outside the AirBnb!
The next day we decided to check out a place called Fergburger – it’s a popular place that supposedly had really good burgers. We frequently saw a line down the block and it is apparently pretty common to wait 30 min or so for a burger. We happened to catch it just right and only waited about 15 min total. It definitely lived up to the hype!
Wandering around Queenstown we came across a couple of statues – one is of William Gilbert Rees. He was a sheep farmer (hence the sheep with him in the statue) and is known as the founder of Queenstown. He was one of the first Europeans to settle the Wakatipu basin. The other statue is a Kiwi. I learned that a Kiwi is a bird native to New Zealand (but you never actually see them). New Zealanders are also referred to as Kiwis. So it’s not just a fruit!
I couldn’t get enough of the scenery in Queenstown. It’s such a beautiful place – it’s known as an adventure capital (bungee jumping, etc) but it’s a really great place for nature lovers too. We saw mountain bikers all over town so I know there were a lot of trails (Chris didn’t check them out since we were there for the marathon and didn’t want to chance getting hurt before the race but I am sure it’s a great place for mountain biking – when we rode the Skyline gondola, there was a whole separate line for bikes so they could take that up the mountain and then ride down).
One of my favorite books as a kid was Miss Rumphius (the Lupine Lady!) but I had never actually seen a lupine before. We saw some in Queenstown and I was so excited! If you have never read this book, I found a couple of videos on YouTube of someone reading it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z60vWZNZI8). I had to listen to it after seeing these.
One our 3rd day there we took a tourist cruise on Lake Wakatipu on the TSS Earnslaw – a coal-fired steamship. https://www.realnz.com/en/experiences/day-cruises/tss-earnslaw-lake-cruises/. You can also do a package that includes stopping at Walter Peak and having a BBQ lunch or seeing the working farm. We decided to just do the cruise – the ship itself was cool to see how it functioned and we enjoyed the beautiful scenery, including Lake Wakatipu and views of the Remarkables mountains. I also got a cool video of them loading up coal onto the ship!
After that we headed out to the race expo to get our bibs, etc. I’ll do a separate post about the race though. The next day we took the short bus ride up to Arrowtown and explored the town plus the Chinese settlement – and read about the Chinese settlers who came for the gold rush (https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-go/otago/places/arrowtown-area/things-to-do/arrowtown-chinese-settlement/). We wandered down the Main Street and stopped at a place called The Winery – they had a bunch of wines (including a bunch of wines from the Central Otago region) that you could self-serve and pick a size – taster, half glass, full glass. It was a cool way to try a bunch of different wines from the area.
More to come on the Queenstown marathon (and the post-race onset!). Stay tuned!
